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HOW NATIVES THINK 


(LES FONCTIONS MENTALES DANS 
LES SOCIÉTÉS INFERIEURES) 





BY 


PROF. LUCIEN LEVY-BRUHL 


OF THE SORBONNE 


Authorized Translation 
BY 


LILIAN, A. CLARE 





NEW YORK 
ALFRED : A - KNOPF 


(All vights reserved) 


Printed in Great Britain by 
Unwin Brothers, Lid., Woking 


AUTHOR’S FOREWORD 


La Menrautré Primitive, which appeared in English in 1923, 
and Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures, 
published in the same language to-day, really make one and 
the same work in two volumes. It was due to the accident 
of circumstances alone that the second was translated into 
English before the first. The volumes can certainly be read 
separately, but, as the critics have remarked, the essential 
theories I maintain and the principles upon which I rely 
are all contained in the earlier one, now available to the English 
reader, and undoubtedly the two volumes will be best under- 
stood if read in the order in which they were written. 

The fact that at this date, after having been submitted 
to the tests of time and experience, the theories maintained 
in Les Fonctions Mentales still seem to me to hold good, would 
possibly not be sufficient guarantee of their truth—nor even 
the fact that my present researches in the same subject appear 
to confirm them. One is always fearful of being the dupe of 
flattering illusions concerning the cause he is pleading. Happily 
in this case I can appeal to other witnesses, less likely to be 
partial. Among those whose official functions, or vocations, 
bring them into constant relations with primitives, among 
the administrators and missionaries who share their everyday 
life, there are many who, hitherto strangers to me, have been 
good enough to write and tell me that these volumes have been 
of service tothem. They say that the reading of Les Fonctions 
Mentales and La Mentalité Primitive helps them to compre- 
hend much that had appeared both unintelligible and ridiculous 
in the way natives reason, and also in their customs, and that 
their relations with them are accordingly facilitated and 
improved. 


6 HOW NATIVES THINK 


In this I find the most valuable reward and the best en- 
couragement that I can possibly receive, and this, too, 
emboldens me to present to-day to the English-reading public 

the translation of Les Fonctions Mentales, in the hope that it 
may be as well received as Primitive Mentality has been. 

I also desire to express my thanks to Mrs. Clare for her 
excellent translation and for the care with which she has 
compiled the index. 


L. LEVY-BRUHL. 


PARIS, 
October 1925. 


CONTENTS 


ERS OP a AL SENG a aOR OA LI RG A 


INTRODUCTION . ; : : : ‘ ; À i : : 


I. A brief definition of collective representations. The object of 
this book. Its bearing upon the work of sociologists and upon 
present-day psychology. 


II. Earlier theories. Comte and his teaching with regard to the 
higher mental functions. The mind of the primitive, from the 
point of view of ethnography, anthropology, and that of the 
English school in particular. ‘ 


BIT) A postulate granted by all: the human mind is at all times and 
everywhere true to type. The “ animism ”’ of Tylor and Frazer 
and their school implies acceptance of this postulate. 


IV. A critical examination of the methods of this school. Examples 
drawn from Frazer’s work. 1. It leads to probabilities merely. 
2. It disregards the social nature of the phenomena to be ex- 
plained. The influence of this school upon associationistic psy- 
chology, and Herbert Spencer’s philosophy of evolution. 


V. Types of mentality differ among themselves as do social types. 
The paucity of documentary evidence, either contemporaneous 


or earlier, in determining these differences. To what extent, 


and by what methods, can this deficiency be made good ? 


PART I 


CHAPTER 1 


COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS IN PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 
AND THE MYSTICAL CHARACTER OF SUCH . . . . 


I, Emotional and motor elements inherent in the collective 
representations of primitives. Mystic properties attributed to 
animals, plants, part of the human body, inanimate objects, the 
soil, the shape of manufactured articles. The persistence of this 
form and the danger of making any change in it whatever. 
Primitives do not perceive things as we do. Our traditional 
problems have to be reversed. 


PAGE 


35 





HOW NATIVES THINK 


PAGE 
Predominance of mystic elements in primitives’ perceptions; 
their ideas of images and portraits, names, shadows, dreams. 
q 


Perceptions peculiar to certain privileged persons. 


The primitive’s impermeability to experience. The reality he 
perceives at once natural and supernatural. The omnipresence 
of spirits. 


CHAPTER II 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION . ; . ‘ r ; f i OG 


a 


III. 


IV. 


PET à 


The difficulty of reconstructing the connections uniting the 
collective representations of primitives. Examples of connec- 
tions which are foreign to our thought, and cannot be explained 
either by a simple association of ideas, or by a childish appli- 
cation of the principle of causality. 


The law of participation. An approximate statement of this 
law. Primitive thinking is both mystic and prelogical, as 
proved by the collective representations respecting souls. 
Tylor’s animism ; his theory examined. The concept of “ soul ” 
a comparatively recent one. 


The law of participation determines the social group’s idea of 
itself and the human and animal groups around it. It is 
implied in the intichiuma ceremonies of the Aruntas, in their 
idea of mythical beings in the shape of animals, and in general 
in their group idea of the relations between human beings and 
animals. 


This law is implied in the primitive conception of the influences 
which persons and things exert upon each other (by contact, 
transference, contamination, sympathy, possession, etc.). The 
representation of personified spirits does not appear to be a 
primitive one. 


CHAPTER III 


THE FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY . . . 110% 


Nu 


II. 


Logical and prelogical elements co-existent in prelogical men- 
tality. Such a mentality is essentially synthetic. 


How memory functions in prelogical mentality; its develop- 
ment. The sense of locality, and of direction. 


Abstraction, and the concepts peculiar to prelogical mentality. 
Generalization peculiar to prelogical mentality. 


Primitive classification. The concepts of mana, wakan, orenda, 
etc., and other collective representations of a similar nature 
involve the law of participation. » 





CONTENTS 


PAs Le 


CHAPTER IV 


THE MENTALITY OF PRIMITIVES IN RELATION TO THE LANGUAGES 
THEY SPEAK . . . . . ° . . . . 


I. Number in the language of primitive peoples: the dual, trial, 
and plural. 


II. These languages strive to express the detailed form, position, 
and movements of persons and things. 


III. An example taken from the language of Klamath Indians. 
The immense number of suffixes and prefixes, and their uses, 


IV. The custom of talking by gesture common in many undeveloped 
races. The similarity of sign language and vocal language. 
si The Lautbilder. 


V. The wealth or poverty of the vocabulary of primitive languages 
corresponds with the primitives” methods of abstraction and 
.generalization. 


VI. The mystic power of words. Languages peculiar to special 
circumstances or certain classes of people. Sacred languages. 


CHAPTER V 


PRELOGICAL MENTALITY IN RELATION TO NUMERATION . . 


I. Methods by which prelogical mentality supplements any defic- 
iency in numerals when it does not count beyond two or three. 


II. Number not at first distinct from the objects enumerated. 
Sometimes the number-series varies with the class of objects to 
be counted. ‘“‘ Classifiers.’” The same word may indicate several 
numbers in succession. 


III. There is no basis upon which primitives establish their numerical 
system, nor is there a natural one. The numerical system 
depends upon the collective representations of the social group, 
and the participations which these representations involve. 


IV. The mystic power inherent in numbers. Critical examination 
of Usener’s theory. The mystic value of the numbers four, 
five, six, etc. Mystic numbers in the Vedic texts. Reply to an 
objection, 


PAGE 


139 


181 


IO HOW NATIVES THINK 


PARDEE 


CHAPTER VI 


INSTITUTIONS IN WHICH COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS 
GOVERNED BY THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION ARE 
INVOLVED (1) 


I. Hunting. Mystic influences exercised upon the quarry (such 
as dances, fasts, incantations, etc.) in order to summon it, to 
paralyse or blind it. Mystic influences exerted upon the hunter, 
and prohibitions imposed upon him and his. Ceremonies calcu- 
lated to appease the spirit of the slaughtered game. 


II. Fishing. Mystic influences, similar to the above, exercised to 
ensure the presence of fish and to cause it to enter the nets. 
Mystic arts practised upon the fisherman, and prohibitions upon 
him and his. Rites of expiation and propitiation after fishing. 


III. Similar rites applied to warfare. 


IV. Rites the object of which is to secure regularity in the natural 
order of phenomena. The Aruntas’ intichiuma ceremonies. 
The mystic relation of the totemistic group to its totem. 


V. The couvade. Participation between child and parents. 
Customs pertaining to pregnancy, parturition, and early infancy. 
Persistence of participation, even at the time of initiation. 


CHAPTER VII 


INSTITUTIONS IN WHICH COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS 
GOVERNED BY THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION ARE 
INVOLVED (11) 


I. Illness always produced by the influence of spirits in various 
forms. Diagnosis concerned with the discovery of the spirit 
involved. Treatment essentially mystic, spirit acting on spirit. 
Cherokee prescriptions. Classification of diseases. 


II. Death never “ natural.’’ The double significance of the term. 
Practices of divination to discover the power responsible for 
the death, and where it is to be sought for. Juxta hoc, ergo 
propter hoc. 


III. Divination, a means of discovering latent or hidden partici- 


pation. The divinatory significance of games. Sympathetic 
magic. 


PAGE 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER VIII 


INSTITUTIONS IN WHICH COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS 


Il. 


IV. 


VI. 


Vil. 


GOVERNED BY THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION ARE 
INVOLVED (III) . 


The dead continue to live. Contradiction of ideas which this 
continued existence involves. The several stages of dying. 


Practices immediately following a death. Premature burials. 
The condition of the dead between his decease and the funeral 
obsequies. The sentiments a dead man inspires. 


The ceremony which ends the period of mourning completes the 
death. The obligations which cease when this ceremony has 
taken place. The dead whose bodies do not decay are 
peculiarly maleficent ghosts. 


The destruction of the deceased’s personal effects. The sense 
in which they continue to belong to him. Property a mystic 
participation. The condition of the widow. 


Birth a reincarnation. Like death, it is going on at different 
times. Mystic idea of conception. White men are reincarna- 
tions of natives. Infanticide, and its significance to prelogical 
mentality. The naming of the child. 


The child previous to initiation not yet participating in the life 
of the social group. The mystic meaning of the rites of initia- 
tion. Apparent death and re-birth. 


Initiation of medicine-men, wizards, shamans, etc., and members 
of secret societies. Mystic meaning of the rites to which they 
are subjected. 


PART IV 


CHAPTER IX 


THE TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 


I. 


II. 


III. 


In communities of the lowest type, participations are felt rather 
than perceived. The paucity of myths in most of such com- 
munities. 


Among more advanced peoples, participations tend towards 
representation. Development of myths and symbols. The 
individualization of spirits. 


Myths and their mystic significance. The participations they 
express. How the interpretation is to be sought for. 


II 


PAGE 


301 


361 


12 HOW NATIVES THINK 








General conditions of the retreat from prelogical mentality 
and the progress towards logical thought. How the imper- 
meability to experience is lessened as soon as its logical absurdity 
comes to be felt The development of conceptual thought. 


Logical thought cannot pretend to supplant prelogical mentality 
entirely. They are co-existent in the apparent unity of the 
thinking subject. Postulates and prejudices which till now 
have hindered the clear perception of their relations, and the 


a: comprehension of their conflicts. 


“SV se, 


INDEX e . . . . e L - LI LL . e e 


PAGE 


387 


INTRODUCTION 


I 


THE representations which are termed collective, defined as 
a whole without entering into detail, may be recognized by 
the following signs. They are common to the members of a 
given social group; they are transmitted from one generation 
to another; they impress themselves upon its individual 
members, and awaken in them sentiments of respect, fear, 
adoration, and so on, according to the circumstances of the 
case. Their existence does not depend upon the individual ; 
not that they imply a collective unity distinct from the indi- 
viduals composing the social group, but because they present 
themselves in aspects which cannot be accounted for by 
considering individuals merely as such. Thus it is that a 
language, although, properly speaking, it exists only in the 
minds of the individuals who speak it, is none the less an 
incontestable social reality, founded upon an ensemble of 
collective representations, for it imposes its claims on each one 
of these individuals ; it is in existence before his day, and it 
survives him. 

This fact leads at once to a very important result, one 
on which sociologists have rightly insisted, but which had 
escaped the notice of anthropologists. To be able to under- 
stand the processes by which institutions have been established 
(especially among undeveloped peoples), we must first rid our 
minds of the prejudice which consists in believing that collec- 
tive representations in general, and those of inferior races) in 
particular, obey the laws of a psychology based upon the 
analysis of the individual subject. Collective representations 
have their own laws, and these (at any rate in dealing with 
primitives 1) cannot be discovered by studying the “ adult, 


t By this term, an incorrect one, yet rendered almost indispensable 
through common usage, we simply mean members of the most elementary 
social aggregates with which we are acquainted. 


Le 


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. 
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L 
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Hu 
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L 4 


14 HOW NATIVES THINK 


civilized, white man.’’ On the contrary, it is undoubtedly the 
study of the collective representations and their connections 
in uncivilized peoples that can throw some light upon the 
genesis of our categories and our logical principles. Durkheim 
and his collaborators have already given examples of what may 
be obtained by following this course, and it will doubtless lead 
to a theory of knowledge, both new and positive, founded upon 
the comparative method. , 

This great task cannot be accomplished save by a series of 
successive attempts. Perhaps their inception will be rendered 
easier if we determine which are the most general laws govern- 
ing collective representations in undeveloped peoples. To find 
out exactly what are the guiding principles of primitive 
mentality, and how these make themselves felt in the primi- 
tive institutions and customs, is the preliminary problem with 
which we have to deal in this volume. Without the labours of © 
those who have preceded me—the anthropologists and eth- 
nologists of various countries—and more particularly without 
the information afforded me by the French sociological school 
I have just mentioned, I could never have hoped to solve this 
problem, or even to present it in practical terms. The analysis 
by that school of numerous collective representations, and of 
the most important among them, such as the group ideas of 
what is sacred, of ‘“‘mana,” totem, magic and religious symbols, 
etc., has alone rendered possible this attempt to co-ordinate 
and systematize these representations among primitives. 
Basing my conclusions on those labours, I have been able to 
show that the mental processes of “primitives” do not 
coincide with those which we are accustomed to describe 
in men of our own type; I believe I have even been able 
to discover wherein the difference between them lies, and 
to establish the most general laws peculiar to the mentality 
of primitives. 

I have received practical help, too, from sie fairly large 
number of psychologists who, following Ribot, aim at showing 
the importance of the emotional and the motor elements of 
mental life in general and extending to the intellectual life, 
properly so called. To quote but two works, both Ribot’s 
Logique des Sentiments and Heinrich Maier’s Psychologie des 
emotionalen Denkens show how narrow were the limits within 


INTRODUCTION 15 


which traditional psychology, under the influence of formal 
logic, sought to confine the life of thought. Mental processes 
are infinitely more elastic, complex, and subtle, and they com- 
prise more elements of the psychic life than a too “‘ simplist ”’ 
intellectualism would allow. Ribot’s observations on psycho- 
logy, therefore, have been very valuable to me. Nevertheless, 
the research I have undertaken differs widely from his. His 
analysis bears mainly upon subjects which are interesting from 
the emotional, passionate, or even pathological standpoint of 
our social aggregates, and hardly gives a glance at the collec- 
tive phenomena to be found among other peoples. I, on the 
other hand, propose to determine which are the most general 
laws governing collective representations (including their 
affective and motor elements) in the most undeveloped peoples 
known to us. 


I] 


That the higher mental functions should be studied by the 
comparative, that is, the sociological, method, is no new idea. 
Auguste Comte had already distinctly advocated it in his 
Cours de Philosoplie positive. He would divide the study of 
these functions between biology and sociology. His well- 
known dictum: ‘“‘ Humanity is not to be defined through 
man, but on the contrary, man through humanity’’ is 
designed to show that the highest mental functions remain 
unintelligible as long as they are studied from the individual 
alone. If we are to understand them we must take the 
development of the race into consideration.: In a man’s 
mental life everything which is not merely the reaction of 
the organism to the stimuli it receives is necessarily of a 
social character. 

The idea was a fertile one, but it did not bear fruit imme- 
diately, either in Comte or in his more or less direct followers. 
In Comte it found the way barred, so to speak, by a sociology 
that he believed he had constructed in its entirety, but which 
actually was a philosophy of history. He thought he had 
shown that the law of the three stages exactly expresses the 
intellectual evolution of humanity considered as a whole, and 
also that of any particular community. In establishing the 


16 HOW NATIVES THINK 


science of the higher mental functions, therefore, he does not 
consider it necessary to begin with a comparative study of 
these functions in different types of human societies. In the 
same way, when constructing his ‘‘ cerebral chart,” he is not 
guided by physiology, so sure is he that the work of the physio- 
logists will confirm a priori his classification and location of 
the faculties. So too, when formulating the essential features 
of his theory of the higher mental functions, the law of the 
three stages suffices him, since the more special laws cannot 
fail to come into line with that one. Similarly, he constructed 
his theory according to the development of Mediterranean 
civilization, but without suspecting a priori that the laws thus 
discovered may not hold good of all the races of humanity. 
In one sense, then, Comte is the initiator of a positive science 
of the mental functions, and to a large extent the merit of 
having conceived it and of having shown it to be a sociological 
science ought to be accorded him. But he did not undertake 
the investigation of phenomena which such a science demands. 
He did not even attempt it, and at the time he wrote his 
Politique positive, he would doubtless have condemned it as 
““useless.”’ 

Nevertheless, the patient and meticulous study of mental 
phenomena in differing types of human societies, the necessity 
of which Comte had not perceived, had been begun by others, 
and they pursued it perseveringly, not as philosophers but as 
experts, with the straightforward aim of discerning and classi- 
fying facts. I mean the anthropologists and ethnologists and 
the English school of anthropology in particular. Primitive 
Culture, the important work of its head, E. B. Tylor, which 
appeared in 1871, and marks an epoch in the history of anthro- 
pological science, led the way for a large number of zealous 
and well-trained collaborators, whose work is not unworthy of 
their leader. Thanks to their zeal, an immense mass of 
documents dealing with the institutions, customs, and lan- 
guages of so-called savage or primitive races, and with the 
group ideas governing these, has been accumulated. Work of 
a similar kind has been carried on in Germany and in France. 
In the United States, the Ethnological Bureau of the Smith- 
sonian Institute published some excellent monographs on the 
Indian tribes of North America. 


INTRODUCTION 17 


Now as the documents increased in number, a certain 
uniformity in the phenomena of which they treated became 
continually more evident. As fast as undeveloped peoples 
were discovered, or more thoroughly studied, in the most 
distant quarters of the globe, sometimes at the very antipodes 
of each other, extraordinary likenesses, sometimes even exact 
resemblances, down to the smallest details, were found to 
exist. There were the same institutions ; the same religious 
or magical ceremonies ; the same beliefs and customs relating 
to birth and death; the same myths, and so on. Thus the 
comparative method established itself, as it were. Tylor 
makes continual and very felicitous use of it in his Primitive 
Culture; so, too, does Frazer in The Golden Bough, and so also 
do other representatives of the school, such as Sydney Hartland 
and Andrew Lang. 

By so doing, these writers have been the necessary pre- 
cursors of the positive science of the higher mental functions, 
but they did not originate it, any more than Comte, though 
the reasons in their case were not the same. Why did not the 
use of the comparative method lead them to it? Was it for 
want of having regarded the problem as universal, and, having 
once compared primitive races with each other, comparing 
them with our own? Not at all. The English school of 
anthropology, on the contrary, following the example of its 
head, is perpetually trying to show the relation between 
“savage’’ and “ civilized’ mentality, and to explain it. And 
it is just this explanation which has prevented their going any 
further. They had it ready-made. They did not look for it 
in the facts themselves, but imposed it on’ them. While 
testifying to the existence of primitive institutions and beliefs 
so entirely different from our own, they did not ask themselves 
whether, to account for them, they ought not to examine 
various hypotheses. They took it for granted that the facts 
could be explained in one way only. Do the collective repre- 
sentations of the communities in question arise out of higher 
mental functions identical with our own, or must they be 
referred to a mentality which differs from ours to an extent yet 
to be determined? Such an alternative as the latter did not 
occur to their minds. 


18 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Ee 


Without entering upon a critical discussion of the method 
employed and the results obtained by these experts '~a 
discussion to which I could not devote the space it demands-— 
I should merely like to demonstrate in a few words the con- 
sequences to their theory of this belief in the identity of 
a “human mind” which, from the logical point of view, is 
always exactly the same at all times and in all places. Such 
an identity is admitted by the school as a postulate, or rather, 
anaxiom. There is no need to demonstrate it, or even formally 
enunciate it: it is an understood principle, and too evident 
for any consideration of it to be necessary. Accordingly, the 
collective representations of primitives, so often foreign to our 
ideas, and the connections we find between them, which are no 
less strange, do not raise problems the solutions of which may. 
either amplify or modify our conception of the. “‘ human 
mind.” We know already that this mind of theirs is not 
different from ourown. All we have to find out is the way in 
which mental functions exactly like ours have been able to 
produce these representations and their connections, and here 
comes in the general hypothesis which the English school of 
anthropology favours : it is animism. 

Frazer’s Golden Bough, for instance, clearly shows how 
animism accounts for many of the beliefs and practices found 
almost everywhere in primitive social aggregates, numerous 
traces of which survive in our own. We shall notice that 
the hypothesis comprehends two successive stages. In the 
first place, the primitive, surprised and moved by apparitions 
which present themselves in his dreams—where he sees once 
more the dead and the absent, talks and fights with them, 
touches them and hears them speak—believes in the objective 
reality of these representations. To him, therefore, his own 
existence is a double one, like that of the dead and absent 
who appear to him. He admits his actual existence as a living 
and conscious personality, and at the same time as a soul able 
to separate itself from him, to become external to him and 


1 On this point see Durkheim’s articles in the Revue Philosophique of 
January and February 1909, entitled ‘ Examen critique des systèmes 
classiques sur l’origine de la pensée religieuse.” 


INTRODUCTION 10 


manifest itself in a ‘“ phantom ” state. This belief would be 
universal among primitives, because all would be subject to 
the psychological self-delusion in which it originated. In the 
second place, when they want to account for the natural 
phenomena which make an impression on their senses, and 
assign a cause to them, they immediately apply and generalize 
the explanation they have accepted of their dreams and 
hallucinations. In all forms of being, and behind all natural 
phenomena, they imagine “‘souls,’”’ “‘ spirits,’ ‘‘ intentions,”’ 
similar to those they believe they have experienced in them- 
selves and their companions, and in animals. It is a simple 
and artless logical process, but not less spontaneous nor less 
inevitable to the “‘ primitive’’ mind, than the psychological 
illusion which preceded it and upon which it is based. 

Thus without any attempt at reflection, by the mere 
influence of mental processes which are the same to all, the 
primitive develops a “‘ philosophy ”’ of his own, childish and 
clumsy, no doubt, but yet perfectly consistent with itself. It 
propounds no problem that it cannot immediately solve to its 
complete satisfaction. If it were anyhow possible for all the 
experience acquired and transmitted through the centuries to 
be suddenly obliterated—if we were brought face to face with 
nature like the real “‘ primitives,’’ we should be certain to 
construct. for ourselves a “natural philosophy,” which would 
* also be primitive, and that philosophy would be a universal 
animism, quite correct from the logical point of view, consider- 
ing the paucity of positive data we should have at command. 

The hypothesis of animism in this sense, then, is a direct 
consequence of the axiom which dominates the researches of 
the English school of anthropology, and, according to our 
view, it is this that has prevented it from attaining to a positive 
science of the higher mental functions, to which the compara- 
tive method would seem to be leading. For while the resem- 
blance in institutions, beliefs and practices in undeveloped 
peoples of the most varied kind is explained by such a hypo- 
thesis, it takes no trouble to demonstrate that their superior 
mental functions are identical with our own. The axiom 
serves them as demonstration. The fact that myths and 
collective representations like those on which totemism is 
based, such as the belief in spirits, in separate and external 


€ 


20 HOW NATIVES THINK 


souls, and in sympathetic magic, are to be found in all human 
aggregates, is a necessary result of the structure of the “ human 
' mind.” The laws governing the association of ideas, and the 
natural and irresistible application of the law of causality, 
combined with animism, would be certain to engender these 
collective representations and their connections. It is only 
the spontaneous working of an unvarying logical and psycho- 
logical process. Nothing is easier to explain if we once admit, 
as the English anthropological school implicitly does, that this 
process is the same in undeveloped peoples as it is with us. 

Must we admit this? That is what I have to find out. 
But even at this point it is clear that if there be any doubt 
about this axiom, animism, based upon it, would also be matter 
of doubt and could in no case serve as a proof. We should 
find it impossible, unless we argued in a vicious circle, to 
account for the spontaneity of animism in primitives by a 
specific mental construction, and affirm the existence of the 
latter in them by relying upon this same spontaneity of 
animism for support. An axiom and its deduction cannot be 
proved by each other. 


IV 


It now remains to be seen whether the animist theory is 
borne out by the facts, and whether it is sufficient to account 
for the institutions and beliefs of primitive peoples. This is 
the point upon which Tylor, Frazer, Andrew Lang and many 
other representatives of this school have expended both 
knowledge and skill. The tremendous amount of documentary 
evidence they bring forward in support of their position is 
almost incredible to those who have not read it. In dealing 
with this vast collection, however, two things must be borne in 
mind. The first is that we may consider the presence of the 
same institutions, beliefs, practices in a great number of widely 
separated but typically analogous peoples, as established. 
From this we may legitimately conclude that the mental 
processes which produce these similar ideas are the same, for 
it is clear that resemblances of such a kind, which occur so 
frequently and are so exact, cannot be merely fortuitous. But 
the accumulated facts which are conclusive upon this point 


INTRODUCTION 1 


are not equally valid when it is a case of proving that these oe 
ideas have a common origin in the belief in animism, in a 
spontaneous ‘natural philosophy” which would be the 
earliest reaction of the human mind to the appeal of experience. 

Undoubtedly the explanation of each belief or practice thus 
obtained is usually plausible, and we can always imagine the 
working of the mental process which led to it in the primitive : 
but it is only plausible. And is it not the first rule of any 
prudent method never to take for granted that which is merely 
probable? Savants have learnt in so many cases that the 
apparently true is rarely the truth. There is a like reserve, in 
this respect, among philologists and natural philosophers. 
Must not the sociologist be equally cautious? The very 
language of the anthropologists and the form adopted by their 
demonstrations show that they do not go beyond probability, 
and the number of the facts brought forward adds nothing to 
the conclusive force of the argument. 

Uncivilized races have an almost universal custom of 
destroying a dead man’s weapons, his clothes, the things he 
used, even his house, and occasionally they sacrifice his wives 
and his slaves. How are we to account for this? “The 
custom,” says Frazer, ‘‘ may : have sprung from the idea that 
the dead were angry with the living for dispossessing them. . . . 
The idea that the souls of the things thus destroyed are dis- 
patched to the spirit-land . . . is less simple and therefore 
probably * later.” 2 

Undoubtedly this custom may have arisen thus; but it 
may also be of different origin. Frazer’s theory does not 
preclude any other, and his wording even acknowledges this. 
As to the general principle upon which he relies, and which he 
expressly formulates a little further on: “‘ In the evolution of 
thought, as of matter, the simplest is the earliest,” it un- 
doubtedly proceeds from Herbert Spencer’s philosophy, but 
that does not make it any the more certain. I do not think 
it can be proved in the material world, and in what we know 
of the world of ‘ thought,” the facts would seem to contradict 
it. Frazer seems to be confusing ‘simple ’’ and “ undiffer- 


1 The italics are mine (L. L.-B.). 

2 “ Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the 
Soul,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute (henceforth J.A.I,), xv. p. 75 
(note 1), (1885). 


22 HOW NATIVES THINK 


entiated’’ here. Yet we find that the languages spoken 
by peoples who are the least developed of any we know— 
Australian aborigines, Abipones, Andaman Islanders, Fuegians, 
etc.—exhibit a good deal of complexity. They are far less 
‘simple ”’ than English, though much more “ primitive.” 
Here is another instance, taken from the same article by 
Frazer. It is a common practice in varying regions, and 
persistent from all time, to place in the mouth of a dead man 
either some grains of corn or a gold coin. Frazer quotes from 
a considerable number of documents in proof of this. Then he 
explains it thus. ‘The original custom may have been that 
of placing food in the mouth, for which in after times valuables 
(money or otherwise) were substituted, that the dead might 
buy his own food.”’! The explanation is a probable one, but 
in one case in which we can check it, it is incorrect. A similar 
custom has existed in China from time immemorial, and De 
Groot, following old Chinese documents, gives us the true 
reason. Gold and jade are substances which endure indefi- 
nitely. They are symbols of the celestial sphere, “‘ which is 
unchangeable, indestructible, beyond the influences of decay. 
. . . Hence jade and gold (pearls too) naturally endow with 
vitality all persons who swallow them ; in other words, they 
intensify their souls or shen, which are, like the heavens, 
composed of Yang matter; and they hold at a distance from 
the dead corruption and decay, thus furthering their return to 
life.’ 2 We must even go further. ‘“‘ Taoist and medical 
authors assert that, whoever eats jade, gold or pearls does not 
only prolong his life, but ensures also the existence of his body 
after death, saving it from putrefaction. This doctrine, by its 
mere existence, intimates that szen, who acquired immortality 
by eating such or other substances, were conceived to continue 
using their body after their earthly career, or removed to the 
region of the immortals, also corporally. A new light is thus 
shed on the custom of ancients and moderns to keep away 
corruption from the dead by placing the three precious things 
in their mouths or other apertures: it was an attempt to 
make sten of them.’’3 Elsewhere the dead are given money 
with which to make their purchases in the next world, but it is 


1 J.A.I., xv. pp. 77-9 (note). 
> J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. p. 271. 
3 Ibid., il. pp. 331, 332. 





INTRODUCTION 23 


not put into their mouths. Here we have a belief similar to 
that which induces the Chinese to choose for their coffins 
woods distinguished for their durability, such as pine and 
cypress ‘‘ both of which are possessed of great vitality, so that 
the wood, when placed around the dead, might facilitate their 
return to life.”’t These are cases, similar to so many others 
we read of, of participation through contact. 

These two examples will doubtless suffice, although we 
could cite many similar ones. The ‘‘explanations’’ of the 
English school of anthropology, being never anything more 
than probable, are always affected by a co-efficient of doubt, 
which varies according to the circumstances of the case. They 
take it for granted that the ways which, to our minds, seem 
to lead naturally to certain beliefs and practices, are precisely 
those trodden by the members of the communities in which 
they are to be found. Nothing can be more risky than such a 
postulate, and it would possibly not be confirmed five times 
out of a hundred. 

In the second place, the phenomena to be accounted for— 
institutions, beliefs, practices—are all pre-eminently social 
phenomena. Should not the representations and the con- 
nections between the representations be of the same nature ? 
Are they not necessarily ‘ collective representations ” ? But - 
in such a case the animist theory becomes suspect, and with it 
the postulate upon which it was based, for both theory and 
postulate deal with the mental processes of the individual 
human mind only. Collective representations are social 
phenomena, like the institutions for which they account ; and 
if there is any one point which contemporary sociology has 
thoroughly established, it is that social phenomena have their 
own laws, and laws which the analysis of the individual qua 
individual could never reveal. Consequently any attempt to 
“explain ” collective representations solely by the functioning 
of mental operations observed in the individual (the association. 
of ideas, the naive application of the theory of causality, and 
so on), is foredoomed to failure. Since some of the data which 
are essential to the problem have been omitted, its defeat is 
certain. We might just as well hope to make scientific use of 
the idea of a human individual mind imagined to be devoid of 

1 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. p. 294. 


24 HOW NATIVES THINK 


all experience whatever. Would it be worth while to try and 
reconstruct the method in which such a mind would represent 
the natural phenomena which occurred within and around 
him? As a matter of fact, we have no means of knowing 
what such a mind would be like. As far back as we can go, 
however primitive the races we may study, we shall never find 
any minds which are not socialized, if'we may put it thus, not 
already concerned with an infinite number of collective repre- 
sentations which have been transmitted by tradition, the 

origin of which is lost in obscurity. | 

The idea of an individual human mind absolutely free from 
all experience is, then, as fanciful as that of man prior to 
social life. It does not correspond with anything that we can 
grasp and verify, and the hypotheses implying it could but be 
arbitrary. If on the other hand, we start with collective — 
representations as our data, as a reality which will bear 
scientific examination, we shall certainly not have probable 
and seductive ‘‘explanations’’ to oppose to those of the 
English school. It will all be much less simple. We shall 
find ourselves faced by complex problems, and very frequently 
we shall not have sufficient data to solve them; very fre- 
quently, too, the solutions we shall propose will be hypo- 
thetical. But at least we may hope that by a positive study 
of collective representations we may arrive by degrees at a 
knowledge of the laws which govern them and thus obtain a 
more correct interpretation of the mentality of primitive 
peoples, and even of our own. 

One example, perhaps, will suffice to show how complete is 
the contradiction between the standpoint of the English school 
of anthropology and the one we hope to see adopted. Tylor 
writes : ‘‘ Conformably with the early child-like philosophy in 
which human life seems the practical key to the understanding 
of nature at large, the savage theory of the universe refers its 
phenomena in general to the wilful action of pervading personal 
spirits. It was no spontaneous fancy, but the reasonable 
inference that effects are due to causes, which led the rude men 
of old days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own 
homes and haunts, and the vast earth and sky beyond. Spirits 
are simply personified causes.’’! There is nothing simpler or 

1 Primitive Culture (4th edit.), ii. pp. 108, 109. 


INTRODUCTION 25 


more acceptable than this ‘explanation ” of an immense 
number of beliefs, provided we admit, as Tylor does, that they 
are the result of a ‘‘ reasonable inference.’’ But it is very 
difficult to grant this. When we consider the collective 
representations which, in undeveloped peoples, imply a belief 
in spirits pervading the whole of nature, which inspires the 
practices relating to these spirits, it does not seem as if these 
practices are the result of a mental curiosity seeking for 
causes. Myths, funeral rites, agrarian practices and the 
exercise of magic do not appear to originate in the desire for a 
rational explanation: they are the primitives’ response to 
collective needs and sentiments which are profound and 
mighty and of compulsive force. 

I do not maintain that this desire for an explanation does 
not exist. Like so many other potentialities which will be 
realized later when the social group develops, this curiosity is 
latent, and it may possibly be already manifest to a slight 
extent in the mental functioning of such peoples. But it is 
assuredly contrary to the facts to see in it one of the main 
directing controls of that functioning, and the origin of the 
collective representations relating to most of the natural 
phenomena. If Tylor and his followers are satisfied with such 
an ‘‘ explanation,” it is because they assume these beliefs to 
exist in individual minds similar to their own. As soon, 
however, as we take into consideration the collective nature of 
these ideas, the inadequacy of this explanation is apparent. 
Being collective, they force themselves upon the individual ; 
that is, they are to him an article of faith, not the product of 
his reason. And since the collective representations, as a rule, 
predominate most where the races are least advanced, the 
mind of the “‘ primitive ’’ has hardly any room for such ques- 
tions as “how?” or ‘“ why ? ’’ The ensemble of collective 
representations which master him and excite in him an in- 
tensity of feeling which we cannot even imagine, is hardly com- 
patible with that disinterested contemplation of a matter which 
a purely intellectual desire to probe into its cause would demand. 

Without entering upon a detailed discussion of the theory 
of animism here—for we shall find room for it later—we are 
allowed to think that Tylor’s dictum that “ spirits are per- 
sonified causes ”” does not suffice to account for the place held 


26 HOW NATIVES THINK 


by spirits in the collective representations of primitives. To 
us, however, interested first of all in analysing these repre- 
sentations without any preconceived ideas about the mental 
processes upon which they depend, it may possibly be the 
“ spirits,” on the contrary, which will help us to understand 
what certain ‘causes ” are. Perhaps we shall find that the 
effect of the efficient cause—vexata questio to the philosophers 
—is a sort of abstract precipitate of the mystic power attri- 
buted to spirits. This is a theory which we intend to examine, 
and in any case we shall be suspicious of categorical and 
comprehensive pronouncements. The English school of 
anthropology, with its lofty theory of animism and its pre- 
conceived ideas, always has at least a probable explanation of 
the phenomena it has collected. If new phenomena manifest 
themselves, its theory is plastic and general enough to permit 
of its explaining these too; it only requires the exercise of a © 
little ingenuity. It sees in these a confirmation of its theory. 
But this confirmation has precisely the same validity as the 
probable “‘ explanations ”’ of which it is but a fresh example. 


We are sure to be asked how a savant such as Tylor, whose 
perspicacity is so marvellous and whose criticism is so acute in 
dealing with special phenomena, should have shown himself 
less exacting when a general theory was at stake, and how it is 
that his followers could have imitated his example in this 
matter. Perhaps we must take into account here the influence 
of contemporary English philosophy, and the theory of evolu- 
tion in particular. At the time Primitive Culture appeared, 
and for some years after, the philosophy of associationism 
seemed to have a definite sway. The evolutionism of Herbert 
Spencer, then greatly in repute, exercised considerable fascina- 
tion over many minds. They saw in it the expression of the 
most comprehensive philosophical synthesis: an expression 
which could at the same time be adapted to any class of natural 
phenomena whatever, and thus serve as a guiding line in 
scientific research. It could be applied to the history of the 
solar system as easily as to the genesis of organic matter, or 
that of the intellectual life. They might therefore anticipate that 
it would be extended to social phenomena, and Spencer did not 
disappoint them in this. He too, as we know, took as his govern- 


INTRODUCTION 27 


ing hypothesis in explaining the mentality of primitives, a 
theory of animism based upon an associationistic philosophy. 

At the present day, Herbert Spencer’s evolutionism is 
somewhat severely judged. His generalizations appear hasty, 
presumptuous, and not well founded. Thirty years ago, how- 
ever, they were considered both substantial and potent. 
Tylor and his school believed they saw in them a guarantee 
for the continuity in man’s mental development which they 
formulate. Such a doctrine allowed them to present this 
development as an uninterrupted evolution, the stages of 
which could be noted, from the animistic beliefs of ‘‘ primi- 
tives ’’ to the Newtonian conception of the universe. At the 
same time, a little throughout his Primitive Culture, and 
especially in its concluding parts, Tylor takes the trouble to 
refute a theory according to which “‘savage”’ races are in 
reality degenerate ones—their representation of nature, their 
institutions and beliefs being the almost obliterated but yet 
recognizable remains of original revelation. But to oppose to 
this theory of a theological order, can Tylor find anything 
better than the theory of evolution which is, according to 
him, of a scientific order? The latter provides him with a 
rational interpretation of the facts. That which has been 
presented as the vestiges of a more perfect antecedent state, 
Tylor readily explains, from the evolutionist point of view, to 
be the rudimentary germ of a succeeding state which shall be 
more differentiated. 

Finally, when we remember how much apparent clearness 
and intelligibility the general theory of animism gives to the 
mass of evidence, we shall not be surprised at the success it 
has shared with the theory of evolution, nor wonder that the 
large majority of the English school of anthropology should 
have remained faithful to it until now. 


V 


The series of social phenomena are solidary with respect to 
each other, and they are placed in mutual relationship. A 
definite type of society, with its own institutions and customs, 
will therefore necessarily have its own mentality. Different 
mentalities will correspond with different social types, and all 


28 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the more because institutions and customs themselves are at 
bottom only a certain aspect of collective representations, only 
these representations considered objectively, as it were. Thus 
we are led to perceive that the comparative study of the 
different types of human societies is linked up with the com- 
parative study of the collective representations and the 
connections between these, which dominate such societies. 

Similar considerations must have prevailed with the 
naturalists when, while retaining the idea of the identity of 
the essential functions in all living beings, or at any rate, of 
all animal nature, they decided to admit types differing funda- 
mentally from each other. There is no doubt that the pro- 
cesses of nutrition, respiration, secretion, reproduction, do not 
vary in essentials, whatever the organism which manifests 
them may be. But they may be manifested in an ensemble of 
conditions which are totally different from the histological or 
anatomical or physiological point of view. General biology 
made a great advance when it recognized that it could not (as 
Auguste Comte believed) find in the analysis of the human 
organism the means of attaining a clearer understanding of the 
organism of a sponge. From that time forward, the study 
of biology proper was not complicated by preconceived ideas 
of the subordination of one entity to another, notwithstanding 
the possibility of forms originally of a common type, prior to 
divergence. 

In the same way, there are features which are common to 
all aggregates of human beings, by which they may be distin- 
guished from the rest of the animal world. Language is 
spoken, traditions are transmitted, and institutions main- 
tained. The higher mental operations, therefore, have every- 
where a basis of homogeneity. This being once admitted, 
however, human aggregations, like organisms, may differ 
profoundly in their construction and as a consequence their 
higher mental operations will also present corresponding 
differences. We must then reject beforehand any idea of 
reducing mental operations to a single type, whatever the 
peoples we are considering, and accounting for all collective 
representations by a psychological and mental functioning 
which is always the same. If it be true that there are aggre- 
gates of human beings who differ from each other in construc- 


INTRODUCTION 29 


tion as invertebrate animals differ from vertebrates, a com- 
parative study of the various types of collective mentality is 
just as indispensable to anthropology as comparative anatomy 
and physiology are to biology. 

Is there any need to say that this comparative study, 
conceived thus as universal, presents difficulties which at the 
moment are insurmountable ? In the present state of sociology 
we could not dream of undertaking it. The differentiation of 
types of mentality is as difficult as that of types of society, and 
for similar reasons. What I am attempting here, by way of 
introduction, is a preliminary study of the most general laws 
to which collective representations in inferior races are sub- 
jected, and more especially those of the most primitive peoples 
of which we know anything. I shall endeavour to construct, 
if not a type, at any rate an ensemble of characteristics which 
are common to a group of neighbouring types, and in this way 
to define the essential features of the mentality peculiar to 
undeveloped peoples. 

In order to bring out these features as clearly as possible, I 
shall compare that mentality with our own, i.e. with that of 
races which are the product of ‘‘ Mediterranean ”’ civilization, 
in which a rationalistic philosophy and positive science have 
been developed. For the first rough attempt at comparative 
study there is an evident advantage in making choice of the 
two mental types available, between which the difference is 
greatest. The essential dissimilarities between such will be 
most marked, and as a consequence they will be least likely 
to escape attention. Moreover, in starting: with these we 
shall be most easily able to approach the study of the inter- 
mediary or transitional types. 

Even when confined to such limits, the attempt will no 
doubt appear only too bold, and very uncertain as to result. 
It remains incomplete ; it opens up many more questions than 
it can answer; and leaves unsolved more than one vast 
problem which it touches in a superficial way. I am not 
forgetting all this, but, in examining a mentality which is so 
obscure, I have thought it better to confine myself to that which 
seemed to stand out most distinctly. Besides, as far as the 
mentality peculiar to our society is concerned, since it is only 
to serve me as a state for comparison, I shall regard it as 


30 HOW NATIVES THINK 


sufficiently well defined in the works of philosophers, logicians 
and psychologists, both ancient and modern, without conjec- 
turing what sociological analysis of the future may modify in 
the results obtained by them up to the present. The real 
object of my researches, therefore, is the study, by means of 
the collective representations of primitives, of the mental 
processes which regulate them. 

But we do not know these representations and their con- 
nections except by the institutions, beliefs, myths, customs of 
undeveloped peoples, and how do we obtain these? It is 
nearly always from the accounts of travellers, sailors, mission- 
aries—in short, from documents to be found in the ethno- 
graphical records of the two hemispheres. Every sociologist 
ought to realize the value of these documents. It is a 
problem of capital importance, to which the ordinary rules 
of criticism apply, and one which I cannot broach here. I 
must, however, draw attention to the fact that the anxious 
care to observe undeveloped peoples scientifically, by means of 
a system as objective, precise and detailed as that which 
experts employ in determining natural phenomena, and as 
similar as it can be to this, is but of recent growth. And now 
that it does exist, a kind of irony ordains that it has scarcely 
any object. The last century has witnessed irreparable losses 
to the comparative study of human aggregates. The peoples 
whose institutions would have been of the greatest interest to 
this scientific study are rapidly becoming extinct in the most 
widely separated districts. The undeveloped peoples still 
remaining are doomed to disappear speedily, and it behoves 
careful observers to make haste. 

The enormous accumulation of the older records by no 
means makes up for what we are losing in this way. With 
rare exceptions, the facts collected in passing by travellers who 
only go through a country are of very little value. Major 
Powell remarks with good reason that these people can no 
more make known to us the institutions of a tribal community 
than they can give an exact description of the flora of a 
country, the fauna of a district, or the geological formation of 
a continent.! 


1 Report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington 
(henceforth cited as Æ. B. Rept.), iii. p. 62 


INTRODUCTION 31 


_ In most cases, too, those who first saw these peoples from 
within, even if they lived among them for some time, were 
too much engaged otherwise to be able to give accurate and 
detailed accounts, as complete as possible, of the institutions 
and customs which came to their notice. They observed what 
seemed to them most noteworthy and singular, the things 
that piqued their curiosity ; they described these more or less 
happily. But the observations thus collected were always 
merely side-issues to them, never the main reason for their 
sojourn among these peoples. Moreover, they did not hesitate 
to interpret phenomena at the time they described them: the 
very idea of hesitation would have seemed quite unnecessary. 
How could they suspect that most of their interpretations 
were simply misapprehensions, and that “ primitives’’ and 
“savages ’’ nearly always conceal with jealous care all that is 
most important and most sacred in their institutions and 
beliefs ? 

Nevertheless, as Tylor has clearly shown, many of these 
old observations are illuminated and corrected by the light of 
the knowledge we possess to-day. Some of them, indeed, are 
very valuable ; for instance, those made by certain mission- 
aries who resided for a long time in the community they 
describe, who seem to have assimilated its spirit somewhat, 
and in whose accounts we can easily separate observation 
properly so-called from the preconceived ideas which have 
mingled with it. Such, among others, are the Jesuit fathers 
who were the first to come in contact with the Indian tribes of 
North America,—Dobrizhoffer with the Abipones, in the 
eighteenth century,—and more recently, missionaries like 
Turner in Samoa, Codrington in Melanesia, etc. The earliest 
of this class of observers had the advantage of knowing nothing 
of sociological theories, and it often happens that their 
accounts are of all the more importance to us precisely because 
they do not understand what they are relating. As a set-off 
to this, however, they are often irritatingly incomplete, and 
silent upon the most essential points. 

Compared with these sketches, the correctness of which is 
never certain, which their designers have sometimes retouched 
or refashioned according to the taste of the period, the observa- 
tions made to-day by professional ethnographers appear like 


32 HOW NATIVES THINK 


good, clear photographs. In fact, the collaborators of the 
Ethnological Bureau of the Smithsonian Institute of Washing- 
ton use both photographic and phonographic apparatus as 
part of their necessary equipment. It is from investigators 
aware of the difficulties of their task, and expert in the methods 
which admit of their attacking it with the best chances of 
success, that we look for documents. But even in such cases 
we must not overlook such precautions as a considered 
criticism demands. Many among them are missionaries, 
Catholic or Protestant, and they, like their predecessors of 
past centuries, are convinced that savages derive some kind 
of natural religion from God, and owe to the agency of the 
devil their most reprehensible customs. Many of them, 
both cleric and lay, have read the works of Tylor and Frazer, 
and have become their adherents. Since they have the self- 
imposed task of procuring fresh evidence in support of their - 
masters’ theories, they observe with prejudiced eyes. This 
becomes a serious disadvantage when they set out provided 
with a detailed set of questions drawn up in the spirit of a 
particular school. Their eyes seem to be screened in a way 
which prevents them from perceiving any fact not provided 
for in their catechism, and in relating what they do see, their 
preconceived interpretation can no longer be distinguished 
from the facts themselves. 


PART I 





CHAPTER I 


COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS IN PRIMITIVES’ 
PERCEPTIONS AND THE MYSTICAL CHARACTER 
OF SUCH 


I 


BEFORE undertaking an investigation of the most general laws 
governing collective representations among undeveloped 
peoples, it may be as well to determine what the essential 
characteristics of these representations are, and thus avoid an 
ambiguity which is otherwise almost inevitable. The ter- 
minology used in the analysis of mental functions is suited to 
functions such as the philosophers, psychologists, and logicians 
of our civilization have formulated and defined. If we admit 
these functions to be identical in all human aggregates, there 
is no difficulty in the matter; the same terminology can be 
employed throughout, with the mental reservation that 
“savages ’’ have minds more like those of children than of 
adults. But if we abandon this position—and we have the 
strongest reasons for considering it untenable—then the 
terms, divisions, classifications, we make use of in analysing 
our own mental functions are not suitable for those which 
differ from them; on the contrary, they prove a source of 
confusion and error. In studying primitive mentality, which 
is a new subject, we shall probably require a fresh terminology. 
At any rate it will be necessary to specify the new meaning 
which some expressions already in use should assume when 
applied to an object differing from that they have hitherto 
betokened. 

This is the case, for instance, with the er “ collective 
representations.”’ a | 

In the current eine of psychology which classifies 
phenomena as emotional, motor, or intellectual, ‘ representa- 


36 HOW NATIVES THINK 


tion” is placed in the last category. We understand by it a 
matter of cognizance, inasmuch as the mind simply has the 
image or idea of an object. We do not deny that in the 
actual mental life every representation affects the inclinations 
more or less, and tends to produce or inhibit some movement. 
But, by an abstraction which in a great many cases is nothing 
out of the ordinary, we disregard these elements of the repre- 
sentation, retaining only its essential relation to the object 
which it makes known to us. The representation is, par 
excellence, an intellectual or cognitive phenomenon. 

It is not in this way, however, that we must understand 
the collective representations of primitives. Their mental 
activity is too little differentiated for it to be possible to 
consider ideas or images of objects by themselves apart from 
the emotions and passions which evoke these ideas or are © 
evoked by them. Just because our mental activity is more | 
differentiated, and we are more accustomed to analysing its 
functions, it is difficult for us to realize by any effort of imagi- 
nation, more complex states in which emotional or motor 
elements are integral parts of the representation. It seems to 
us that these are not really representations, and in fact if we 
are to retain the term we must modify its meaning in some 
way. By this state of mental activity in primitives we must 
understand something which is not a purely or almost purely 
intellectual or cognitive phenomenon, but a more complex 
one, in which what is really “‘representation’’ to us is 
found blended with other elements of an emotional or motor 
character, coloured and imbued by them, and therefore imply- 
ing a different attitude with regard to the objects represented. 

Moreover, these collective representations are very often 
acquired by the individual in circumstances likely to make 
the most profound impression upon his sensibility. This is 
particularly true of those transmitted at the moment when he 
becomes a man, a conscious member of the social group, the 
moment when the initiation ceremonies cause him to undergo 
new birth,: when the secrets upon which the very life of the 
group depends are revealed to him, sometimes amid tortures 
which subject his nerves to the most severe tests. It would be 
difficult to exaggerate the intense emotional force of such 


t Vide Chap. VIII. pp. 352-3. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 37 


representations. The object is not merely discerned by the 
mind in the form of an idea or image; according to the cir- 
cumstances of the case, fear, hope, religious awe, the need and 
the ardent desire to be merged in one common essence, the 
passionate appeal to a protecting power—these are the soul of 
these representations, and make them at once cherished, 
formidable, and really sacred to the initiated. We must add, 
too, that the ceremonies in which these representations are 
translated into action, so to speak, take place periodically ; 
consider the contagious effect of the emotional excitement 
of witnessing the movements which express them, the nervous 
exaltation engendered by excessive fatigue, the dances, the 
phenomena of ecstasy and of possession,—in fact everything 
which tends to revive and enhance the emotional nature of 
these collective representations. At any time during the 
intervals between the occurrences of these ceremonies, when- 
ever the object of one of these representations once more 
arises in the consciousness of the ‘‘ primitive,’ even should 
he be alone and in a calm frame of mind at the moment, it 
can never appear to him as a colourless and indifferent image. 
A wave of emotion will immediately surge over him, un- 
doubtedly less intense than it was during the ceremonies, 
but yet strong enough for its cognitive aspect to be almost 
lost sight of in the emotions which surround it. Though in 
a lesser degree, the same character pertains to other collective 
representations—such, for instance, as those transmitted from 
generation to generation by means of myths and legends, and 
those which govern manners and customs which apparently 
are quite unimportant; for if these customs are respected 
and enforced, it is because the collective representations 
relating to them are imperative and something quite different 
from purely intellectual phenomena. 

The collective representations of primitives, therefore, 
differ very profoundly from our ideas or concepts, nor are they 
their equivalent either. On the one hand, as we shall presently 
discover, they have not their logical character. On the other 
hand, not being genuine representations, in the strict sense of 
the term, they express, or rather imply, not only that the 
primitive actually has an image of the object in his mind, and 
thinks it real, but also that he has some hope or fear connected 


38 HOW NATIVES THINK 


with it, that some definite influence emanates from it, or is 
exercised upon it. This influence is a virtue, an occult power 
which varies with objects and circumstances, but is always 
real to the primitive and forms an integral part of his repre- 
sentation. If I were to express in one word the general 
peculiarity of the collective representations which play so 
important a part in the mental activity of undeveloped 


peoples, I should say that this mental activity was a mystic … 


one. In default of a better, I shall make use of this term— 
not referring thereby to the religious mysticism of our com- 
munities, which is something entirely different, but employing 
the word in the strictly defined sense in which “ mystic ” 
implies belief in forces and influences and actions which, 
though imperceptible to sense, are nevertheless real. | 
In other words, the reality surrounding the primitives is . 
itself mystical. Not a single being or object or natural 
phenomenon in their collective representations is what it 
appears to be to our minds. Almost everything that we 
perceive therein either escapes their attention or is a matter of 
indifference to them. On the other hand, they see many 
things there of which we are unconscious. For instance, to 
the primitive who belongs to a totemic community, every 
animal, every plant, indeed every object, such as the sun, 
moon, and stars, forms part of a totem, and has its own class 
and sub-class. Consequently, each individual has his special 
affinities, and possesses powers over the members of his totem, 
class, and sub-class ; he has obligations towards them, mystic 
relations with other totems, and so forth. Even in communi- 
ties where this form does not exist, the group idea of certain 
animals (possibly of all, if our records were complete) is mystic 
in character. Thus, among the Huichols, “ the birds that soar 
highest . . . are thought to see and hear everything, and to 
possess mystic powers, which are inherent in their wing and 
tail feathers.”” These feathers, carried by the shaman, 
‘“‘ enable him to see and hear everything both above and below 
the earth . . . to cure the sick, transform the dead, call down 
the sun, etc.’’! The Cherokees believe that fishes live in 
companies like human beings, that they have their villages, 
their regular paths through the waters, and that they conduct 
1 C, Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, ii. pp. 7-8. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 39 


themselves like beings endowed with reason. They think, 
too, that illnesses—rheumatic affections in particular—pro- 
ceed from a mystic influence exercised by animals which are 
angry with the hunters, and their medical practices testify to 
this belief. 

In Malaya and in South Africa the crocodile, and in other 
places the tiger, leopard, elephant, snake, are the object of 
similar beliefs and practices, and if we recall the myths of 
which animals are the heroes, in both hemispheres, there is no 
mammal or bird or fish or even insect to which the most 
extraordinary mystic properties have not been attributed. 
Moreover, the magic practices and ceremonies which, among 
nearly all primitive peoples, are the necessary accompaniment 
of hunting and fishing, and the sacrificial rites to be observed 
when the quarry has been killed, are sufficiently clear testimony 
to the mystic properties and powers which enter into the 
collective representations relating to the animal world. 

It is the same with plant life. It will doubtless suffice to 
mention the snfichiuma ceremonies described by Spencer and 
Gillen, designed to secure, in mystic fashion, the normal 
reproduction of plants,—the development of agrarian rites, 
corresponding with the hunting and fishing ceremonial, in all 
places where primitive peoples depend wholly or partly on the 
cultivation of the soil for their subsistence—and lastly, the 
highly unusual mystic properties ascribed to sacred plants, as, 
for instance, the soma in Vedic India, and the hikuli among 
the Huichols. 

Again, if we consider the human body, we shall find that 
each organ of it has its own mystic significance, as the wide- 
spread practice of cannibalism and the rites connected with 
human sacrifices (in Mexico, for instance) prove. The heart, 
liver, kidney, the eyes, the fat, marrow, and so on, are reputed 
to procure such and such an attribute for those who feed on 
them. The orifices of the body, the excreta of all kinds, the 
hair and nail-parings, the placenta and umbilical cord, the 
blood, and the various fluids of the body, can all exercise magic 
influences.2 Collective representations attribute mystic power 


t J. Mooney, ‘“ The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., vii. 


Pp. 375: 
+ K. Th. Preuss, ‘ Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,’ Globus, Ixxxvi. 
Pp. 20; Ixxxvii. p. 19. | 


40 HOW NATIVES THINK 


to all these things, and many wide-spread beliefs and practices 
relate to this power. So, too, certain parts of plants and 
animals possess peculiar virtues. ‘‘ Badtz is the name given to 
the evil principle which . . . attends (like an evil angel) 
everything in his life. . . . Von de Wall describes it as the 
‘enchanting or destroying influence which issues from any- 
thing; for example, from a tiger which one sees, from a 
poisonous tree which one passes under, from the saliva of a 
mad dog, from an action which one has performed.’ ”’ 1 

Since everything that exists possesses mystic properties, 
and these properties, from their very nature, are much more 
important than the attributes of which our senses inform us, 
the difference between animate and inanimate things is not of 
‘the same interest to primitive mentality as it is to our own. 
As a matter of fact, the primitive’s mind frequently disregards 
it altogether. Thus rocks, the form or position of which - 
strike the primitive’s imagination, readily assume a sacred 
character in virtue of their supposed mystic power. Similar 
power is ascribed to the rivers, clouds, winds. Districts in 
space, direction (the points of the compass), have mystic 
significance. When the Australian aborigines assemble in 
large numbers, each tribe, and each totem of a tribe, has its 
own place, a place assigned to it by virtue of its mystic affinity 
with a particular spatial region. Facts of a similar nature 
have been noted in North America. I shall not lay any stress 
_on the rain, lightning, or thunder, the symbols of which play 
so important a part in the religious ceremonies of the Zuñi, 
the Australian aborigines, and all aggregates where a pro- 
longed drought is a serious menace to the very existence of the 
group. Finally, in Loango, the soil “is something more to the 
Bafioti than the scene upon which their lives are played out. 
There is in the ground, and there issues from it, a vital influ- 
ence which permeates everything, which unites the present 
and the past. . . . All things that live owe their powers to the 
soil. . . . The people regard their land as a fief from their 
god ... the ground is sacred.’’2 The same belief obtains 
among the North American Indians, who consider it sacrilege 
to till the ground, for by so doing they would run a risk of 


1 W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 427. 
2 Dr. Pechuël-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, pp. 194 et. seq. (1907). 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 41 


offending the mystic power and drawing down dire calamities 
upon themselves. 

Even things made, and constantly used, by man have their 
mystic properties and can become beneficent or terrifying 
according to circumstances. Cushing, who had lived among 
the Zuñis, had made them adopt him, and whose unusual 
versatility of mind led him finally to think like them, says that 
they, “no less than primitive peoples generally, conceive of 
everything made . . . whether structure or utensil or weapon, 

.. as living .. . a still sort of life, but as potent and aware 
nevertheless and as capable of functioning not only obdurately 
and resistingly, but also actively and powerfully in occult 
ways, either for good or for evil. As for living things they 
observe every animal is formed, and acts or functions accord- 
ing to its form—the feathered and winged bird flying, because 
of its feathered form, the furry four-footed animal running and 
leaping, and the scaly and finny fish swimming—. . . So the 
things made or born in their special forms by the hands of man 
also have life and function variously according to their various 
forms.” Even the differences in the claws of beasts, for 
example, are supposed to make the difference between the 
hugging of the bear and the clutching of the panther. ‘‘ The 
forms of these things not only give their power, but also 
restrict their power, so that if properly made, that is made and 
shaped strictly as other things of their kind have been made 
and shaped, they will perform only such safe uses as their 
prototypes have been found to serve.” It is therefore of the 
utmost importance that they shall be faithfully reproduced, so 
that one may not have to fear the unknown “ powers ”’ which 
a fresh form might possess.! 

In this way, according to Cushing, we can account for the 
extraordinary persistence of the same forms among primitive 
peoples, including even the most minute details of the orna- 
mentation with which they decorate the products of their 
industries and arts. The Indians of British Guiana, for 
instance, “ show extraordinary skill in many of the things they 
manufacture but they never improve upon them. They make 
them exactly as their fathers did before them.’’2 This is not, 


1 F. H. Cushing, ‘‘ Zuñi Creation Myths,” E. B. Rept., xiii. pp. 361-3. 
2 Bernau, Missionary Labours in British Guiana, p. 46 (1847). 


42 HOW NATIVES THINK 


as we have been told, merely the result of habit, and of a spirit 
of conservatism peculiar to these peoples. It is the direct 
result of active belief in the mystic properties of the things, 
properties connected with their shape, and which can be 
controlled through this, but which would be beyond the power 
of man to regulate, if there were the slightest change of form. 
The most apparently trifling innovation may lead to danger, 
liberate hostile forces, and finally bring about the ruin of its 
instigator and all dependent upon him. 

In the same way, any change effected by manual labour in 
the state of the soil, building, digging, mining, the making of 
a pavement or the demolition of a building, or even a slight 
modification in its shape by the addition of a wing, may be 
the cause of the greatest misfortunes. | 


‘ Should anyone fall suddenly ill and die,” says De Groot, . 1 


‘“his kindred are immediately ready to impute the cause to 
somebody who has ventured to make a change in the estab- 
lished order of things, or who has made an improvement in his 


own property. . . . Instances are by no means rare of their 
having stormed his house, demolished his furniture, assailed 
his person. . .. No wonder Chinamen do not repair their 


houses until they are ready to fall and become uninhabitable.” 1 
The steeple to be placed on the Catholic church in Pekin 
raised such a storm of protestation that the erection of it had 
to be abandoned. This mystic belief is intimately associated 
with that which the Chinese call the fungshw. But we find 
similar instances in other places. Thus, in the Nicobar Isles, 
‘some of the chief men of Mus, Lapati, and Kenmai came and 
requested me to postpone fixing the beacon until the arrival of 
their people from Chowra, for they said that in consequence of 
this new work, and of a tree that had been felled down by 
Mr. Dobie in their graveyard, near the object, the sea was 
annoyed and had caused high wind and big surf, until they 
supposed that their friends would be drowned at sea.” 2 

In Loango, “the stranger who goes away must not 
demolish his buildings or lay waste his plantations, but leave 
them just as they are. That is the reason why the natives 
protest when Europeans take down whole houses which they 


1 The Religious System of China, i. p. 10 
2 Solomon, “ Diaries Kept in Car Nicobar” J .A.I., XXXii, p. 230. 


VC VIT ail 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 43 


had built, to transport them elsewhere. The corner-stones 
and pillars at least should not be taken out of the ground. . . 
It is even forbidden to carry away the trunks of trees, to make 
excavations for mines, and so forth. A contractor exposes 
himself to serious trouble if, consulting his own wishes, he is 
so presuming as to make a new path, even if much shorter and 
more convenient than the one in use.’”! This is not mere 
misoneism, the dislike of any change which breaks established 
custom. With the old road, they know how matters stand, 
but they are ignorant of the unforeseen consequences, possibly 
calamitous, which might ensue upon the abandonment of it 
and the opening up of a fresh one. A road, like everything 
else, has its own peculiar mystic properties. The natives of. 
Loango say of an abandoned path that it is ‘ dead.” To 
them, as to us, such an expression is metaphorical, but in their 
case it is fraught with meaning. For the path, “‘in active 
existence ’’ has its secret powers, like houses, weapons, stones, 
clouds, plants, animals, and men—in short, like everything of 
which the primitive has a group idea. ‘ All things have an 
invisible existence as well as a visible one,” say the Igorots of 
the Philippine Islands.2 


From these facts and many similar ones which we might 
quote, we can draw one conclusion: primitives perceive 
nothing in the same way as we do. The social milieu which 
surrounds them differs from ours, and precisely because it is 
different, the external world they perceive differs from that 
which we apprehend. Undoubtedly they have the same 
senses as ours—rather more acute than ours in a general way, 
in spite of our persuasion to the contrary—and their cerebral : 
structure is like our own. But we have to bear in mind that 
which their collective representations instil into all their 
perceptions. Whatever the object presented to their minds, 
it implies mystic properties which are inextricably bound up 
with it, and the primitive, in perceiving it, never AGN 
these from it. 

To him there is no phenomenon which is, strictly speaking, 
a physical one, in the sense in which we use the term. “The 


1 Dr. Pechuél-Loesche, Die L ri a PEE, lii. 2, pp. 209-12. 
+ Jenks, The Bontoc Igorot, p. 196 (Manila, 1905). 


44 HOW NATIVES THINK 


rippling water, the whistling wind, the falling rain, any natural 
phenomenon whatever, a sound, a colour,—these things are 
never perceived by him as they are by us, that is, as more or 
less compound movements bearing a definite relation to 
preceding and to subsequent movements. His perceptive 
organs have indeed grasped the displacement of a mass of 
material as ours do; familiar objects are readily recognized 
according to previous experience; in short, all the physio- 
logical and psychological processes of perception have actually 
taken place in him as in ourselves. Its result, however, is 
immediately enveloped in a state of complex consciousness, 
dominated by collective representations. Primitives see with 
eyes like ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds. 
We might almost say that their perceptions are made up of a 
nucleus surrounded by a layer of varying density of repre- __ 
sentations which are social in their origin. And yet such a 
simile seems somewhat clumsy and inexact, for the primitive 
has not the least feeling of such a nucleus and surrounding 
layer ; it is we who separate them; we, who by virtue of our 
mental habits cannot help distinguishing them. To the 
primitive the complex representation is still undifferentiated. 

The profound difference which exists between primitive 
mentality and our own is shown even in the ordinary percep- 
tion or mere apprehension of the very simplest things. Primi- 
tive perception is fundamentally mystic on account of the 
mystic nature of the collective representations which form an 
integral part of every perception. Ours has ceased to be so, 
at any rate with regard to most of the objects which surround 
us. Nothing appears alike to them and to us. For people like 
ourselves, speaking the language familiar to us, there is insur- 
mountable difficulty in entering into their way of thinking. 
The longer we live among them, the more we approximate to 
their mental attitude, the more do we realize how impossible 
it is to yield to it entirely. 

It is not correct to maintain, as is frequently done, that 
primitives associate occult powers, magic properties, a kind of 
soul or vital principle with all the objects which affect their 
senses or strike their imagination, and that their perceptions 
are surcharged with animistic beliefs. It is not a question of 
association. The mystic properties with which things and 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 45 


beings are imbued form an integral part of the idea to the 
primitive, who views it as a synthetic whole. It is at a later 
stage of social evolution that what we call a natural pheno- 
menon tends to become the sole content of perception to the 
exclusion of the other elements, which then assume the aspect 
of beliefs, and finally appear superstitions. But as long as 
this “ dissociation ’’ does not take place, perception remains an 
undifferentiated whole. We might call it “ polysynthetic,” 
like words in the languages spoken by certain primitive 
peoples. 

In the same way, we shall find ourselves in a blind alley, 
whenever we propound a question in such terms as: How 
would the primitive’s mind explain this or that natural 
phenomenon? The very enunciation of the problem implies 
a false hypothesis. We are supposing that his mind appre- 
hends these phenomena like our own. We imagine that he 
simply perceives such facts as sleep, dreaming, illness, death, 
the rise and decline of the heavenly bodies, rain, thunder, etc., 
and then, stimulated by the principle of causality, tries to 
account for them. But to the mentality of undeveloped 
peoples, there are no natural phenomena such as we under- 
stand by the term. Their mentality has no need to seek an 
explanation of them; for the explanation is implied in the 
mystic elements of the collective representations of them. 
Therefore problems of this nature must be inverted. What we 
must seek is not the logical process which might have resulted 
in the interpretation of phenomena, for this mentality never 
perceives the phenomenon as distinct from the interpretation ; 
we must find out how the phenomenon became by degrees 
detached from the complex in which it first found itself 
enveloped, so that it might be apprehended separately, and 
how what originally was an integral part of it should later on 
have become an “ explanation.” 


I] 


The very considerable part played by collective represen- 
tations in the primitives’ perceptions does not result alone in 
impressing a mystic character upon them. The same cause 
leads to another consequence, and these perceptions are 


46 HOW NATIVES THINK 


accordingly oriented differently from our own. In that which 
our perceptions retain, as well as in that which is disregarded, 
the chief determining factor is the amount of reliance that we 
can place upon the unvarying reappearance of phenomena in 
the same given conditions. They conduce to effect the maxi- 
mum ‘objective ”” validity, and, as a result, to eliminate 
everything prejudicial or merely unnecessary to this objec- 
tivity. From this standpoint, too, primitives do not perceive 
as we do. In certain cases where direct practical interests are 
at stake, we undoubtedly find that they pay great attention to, 
and are often very skilful in detecting differences in, impres- 
sions which are very similar, and in recognizing external signs 
of objects or phenomena, upon which their subsistence, and 
possibly even their lives, depend. (The shrewdness of the 


Australian aborigines in finding and profiting by the dew 1 


which has fallen during the night,’ and other similar facts, are 
an example of this.) But, even setting aside that which these 
fine perceptions owe to training and memory, we still find that 
in most cases primitives’ perceptive powers, instead of tending 
to reject whatever would lessen objectivity, lay special stress 
upon the mystic properties, the occult forces of beings and 
phenomena, and are thus oriented upon factors which, to us, 
appear subjective, although to primitives they are at least as 
real as the others. This characteristic of their perceptions 
enables them to account for certain phenomena, the “.explana- 
tion’’ of which, when based solely upon mental or logical 
processes in the individual, does not appear adequate. 

It is a well-known fact that primitives, even members of 
communities which are already somewhat advanced, regard 
artificial likenesses, whether painted, carved, or sculptured, as 
real, as well as the individual they depict. “ To the Chinese,” 
says De Groot, ‘‘ association of images with beings actually 
becomes identification, both materially and psychically. An 
image, especially if pictorial or sculptured, and thus approach- 
ing close to the reality, is an alter ego of the living reality, an 
abode of the soul, nay it is that reality itself. . . . Such 
intense association is, in fact, the very backbone of China’s 
inveterate idolatry and fetish-worship.” 2? In support of his 


1 Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central A ustralia, ii. P. 247. 
2 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, ii. pp. 340-55. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 47 


Statement, De Groot gives a long series of tales which seem 


wholly incredible, but which Chinese authors find perfectly 


natural. A young widow has a child by a clay statue of her 


husband; portraits are endued with life: a wooden dog 


starts running; paper animals, horses, for instance, act 
exactly like living animals; an artist, meeting a horse of a 
certain colour in the street, recognizes it as a work of his. . 

From these the transition to customs which are very general 
in China is an easy one.—Such customs as placing upon the 


tombs of the dead miniature figures of animals, burning paper 
money there, for instance. 


In North America, the Mandans believe that the portraits 
taken by Catlin are alive like their subjects, and that they 
rob these of part of their vitality. It is true that Catlin is 
inclined to draw a long bow, and his stories must be taken 
with a grain of salt. In this respect, however, the beliefs and 
sentiments he attributes to the Mandans are exactly what we 
find noted elsewhere in similar circumstances. ‘I know,” 
Says one man, ‘that this man put many of our buffaloes in his 
book, for I was with him, and we have had no buffaloes since 
to eat, it is true,”’! 

They pronounced me the greatest medicine-man in the 
world,” writes Catlin, ‘ for they said I had made living beings 
—they said they could see their chiefs alive in two places— 
those that I had made were a little alive—they could see their 
eyes move—could see them smile and laugh, and that if they 
could laugh, they could certainly speak, if they should try, and 
they must therefore have some life in them.” : Therefore, 
most Indians refused him permission to take their likenesses. 
It would be parting with a portion of their own substance, and 
placing them at the mercy of anyone who might wish to 
possess the picture. They are afraid, too, of finding them- 
selves faced by a portrait which, as a living thing, may exercise 
a harmful influence. | 

” We had placed,” say the Jesuit missionaries, “ images of 
St. Ignatius and St. Xavier upon our altar. They regarded 
them with amazement; they believed them to be living 
persons, and asked whether they were ondaqui”’ (plural form 
of wakan, supernatural beings): “in short, that which 

* Catlin, The North American Indians, i. pp. 122-3 (Edinburgh, 1903). 


48 HOW NATIVES THINK 


they recognize as superior to humanity. They inquired 
whether the tabernacle were their dwelling, and whether 
these ondagui used the adornments which they saw around 
the altar.” ! 

In Central Africa, too, ‘‘I have known natives refuse to 
enter a room where portraits were hanging on the walls, 
because of the masoka souls which were in them.’’? The 
same author tells the story of a chief who allowed himself to 
be photographed, and who, several months later, fell ill. In 
accordance with his request, the negative had been sent to 
England, and ‘‘his illness was attributed to some accident 
having befallen the photographic plate.” 

Thus the similitude can take the place of the model, and 
possess the same properties. In Loango, the followers of a 


ve ey 


EE Oe 


certain eminent wonder-worker used to make a wooden image ~— 


of their master, imbued it with “‘ power,” and gave it the name 
of the original. Possibly even they would ask their master to 
make his own substitute, so that after his death, as well as 
during his life, they could use it in performing their miracles.3 
On the Slave Coast, if one of twins happens to die, the mother 
“|. . to give the spirit of the deceased child something to 
enter without disturbing the survivor, carries about, with the 
latter, a little wooden figure, about seven or eight inches long, 
roughly fashioned in human shape, and of the sex of the dead 
child. Such figures are nude, as an infant would be, with 
beads around the waist.’’4 With reference to the Bororo of 
Brazil we read ‘‘ they begged Wilhelm most earnestly not to 
let the women see the drawings he had made of the bull- 
roarers ; for the sight of the drawings would kill them as the 
real things would.” 5 Many similar instances had already been 
collected by Tylor.é 

Are these to be explained from a purely psychological point 
of view, as is so frequently the case, by the association of 
ideas ? Must we say, with De Groot, that it is impossible for 


1 Ed. Thwaites, Relations des Jésuites, v. p. 256 (1633). 

2 Hetherwick, ‘‘Some Animistic Beliefs of the Yaos,” /J.A.I., xxxil. 
pp. 89-90. 

3 Dr. Pechuél-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, ili. 2, pp. 378-9 (1907). 

4 A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples, p. 80. 

5 K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvôlhern Zentralbräsiliens, p. 386. 

6 Primitive Culture, il. pp. 169 et seq. 


ag ae eae ae ee TEE 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 49 


them to distinguish a mere resemblance from identity, and 
admit that primitives suffer from the same illusion as the child 
who believes her doll to be alive? First of all, however, it is 
difficult to decide whether the child herself is quite sure of it. 
Perhaps her belief is part of the game and at the same time 
sincere, like the emotions of grown-up people at the theatre, 
shedding real tears about misfortunes which they nevertheless 
know to be but feigned. On the contrary, it is impossible to 
doubt that the primitives’ beliefs which I have just mentioned 
are serious ; their actions prove it. How then can a portrait 
be “ materially and psychically ” identified with its original ? 
To my mind, it is not on account of a childish trust in analogy, 
nor from mental weakness and confusion ; it is not due to a 
naive generalization of the animist theory, either. It is 
because, in perceiving the similitude, as in looking at the 
original, the traditional collective representations imbue it 
with the same mystic elements. 

If primitives view the pictured resemblance differently 
from ourselves, it is because they view the original otherwise 
also. In the latter we note its objective and actual charac- 
teristics, and those only: the shape, size, and proportions of 
the body; the colour of the eyes; the facial“expression, and 
so forth; we find these reproduced in the picture, and there, 
too, we find these alone. But to the primitive, with his 
perceptions differently oriented, these objective features, if he 
apprehends them as we do, are neither the only ones nor the 
most important ; most frequently, they are but the symbols 
or instruments of occult forces and mystic powers such as 
every being, especially a living being, can display. As a 
natural consequence, therefore, the image of such a being 
would also present the mingling of characteristics which we 

term objective and of mystic powers. It will live and prove 
berteficial or malevolent like the being it reproduces : it will be 
its surrogate. Accordingly we find that the image of an 
unknown—and consequently dreaded—object often inspires 
extraordinary dread. ‘I had,” says Father Hennepin, “a 
pot about three feet high shaped like a lion, which we used 
for cooking our food in during the voyage. . . . The savages 
never ventured to touch it with their hands unless they had 
previously covered them with beaver skins. They imparted 


4 


50 HOW NATIVES THINK 


such terror of it to their wives that the latter had it fastened 
to the branches of a tree, for otherwise they would not have 
dared to sleep or even enter the hut if it were inside. We 
wished to make a present of it to some of the chiefs, but they 
would neither accept it nor make use of it, because. they 
feared that it concealed some evil spirit which might have 
killed them.” We know that these Indians in the valley of 
the Mississippi had never before seen a white man, or a lion, 
or a cooking utensil. The likeness of an animal they did not 
know awakened in them the same mystic fears that its 
appearance among them would have done. | 

This identification which appears so strange to us must 
therefore occur naturally. It does not arise out of gross 
mental hallucination or childish confusion of ideas. As soon 


as we realize how primitives view entities, we see that they © 


view reproductions of them in exactly the same way. If 
their perceptions of the originals ceased to be mystic, their 
images would also lose their mystic properties. They would 
no longer appear to be alive, but would be what they are to 
our minds—-merely material reproductions. 


In the second place, primitives regard their names as 
something concrete and real, and frequently sacred. Here are 
a few of the many proofs of it. 


“The Indian regards his name, not as a mere label, but as _ 


a distinct part of his personality, just as much as are his eyes 
or his teeth, and believes that injury will result as surely from 
the malicious handling of his name as from a wound inflicted 
on any part of his physical organism. This belief was found 
among the various tribes from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” 2 
On the East African coast, ‘‘ there is a real and material 


connection between a man and his name, and . . . by means 
of the name injury may be done to the man. . . . In con- 
sequence of this belief the name of the king . . . is always 
kept secret. . . . It appears strange that the birth-name only, 


and not an alias, should be believed capable of carrying some 


of the personality of the bearer elsewhere . . . but the native . 


..1 L. Hennepin, Nouveau Voyage de l'Amérique Septentrionale, pp. 366-7. ; 


_? J. Mooney, “The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees,” £. B. Rept., 
vil. P. 343. 


; 
À 
f 
N 





PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 51 


view seems to be that the alias does not really belong to the 
man.””"1 | 

Accordingly all kinds of precautions become necessary. 
A man will avoid uttering his own name? and the names of 
others, while the names of the dead, above all, will never be 
pronounced ; very frequently, too, even ordinary words in 
which the name of a dead person is implied will fall into desue- 
tude. Alluding to a name is the same thing as laying hands 
on the very person or being that bears thename. It is making 
an attack upon him, outraging his individuality, or again, it is 
invoking his presence and forcing him to appear, a proceeding 
which may be fraught with very great danger. There are 
excellent reasons, therefore, for avoiding such a practice. 
“When they (the Santals) are hunting and see a leopard or a 
tiger they will always call the attention of their companions 
to the fact by calling out ‘a cat,’ or some similar name.” 3 
With the Cherokees, too, “it is never said that a person has 
been bitten by a snake, but that he has been ‘ scratched by a 
brier.” In the same way, when an eagle has been shot for a 
ceremonial dance, it is announced that ‘ a snow-bird has been 
killed,’ the purpose being to deceive the rattlesnake or eagle 
spirits which might be listening,’ 4 The Warramunga, 
instead of mentioning the snake Wollunqua by its name when 
speaking of it, call it Urkulu nappaurima, “‘ because,” say 
they, “if they were to call it too often by its right name, they 
would lose their control over it, and it would come out and eat 
them all up.” 5 

At the beginning of a fresh epoch in his life,—at his initia- 
tion, for instance—an individual receives a new name, and it 
is the same when he is admitted to a secret society. A town 
changes its name to indicate that it is commencing a new era ; 
Yedo becomes Tokyo.6 A name is never a matter of indiffer- 
ence; it implies a whole series of relationships between the 
man who bears it and the source whence it is derived. ‘ A 
name implies relationship, and consequently protection ; 


* A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, pp. 98-9. 
2 Rivers, The Todas, D: 627: 
| 3 Bodding, ‘ On Taboo Customs amongst the Santals,” Journal of the 
Asiatic Society of Bengal, iii. p. 20 (1898). 
_-4 J. Mooney, The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, p. 352. 
5 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, DP. 227. 
6 Chamberlain, Things Japanese, p. 344 (1902). . | 





52 HOW NATIVES THINK 


favour and influence are claimed from the source of the name, 
whether this be the gens or the vision. A name, therefore, 
shows the affiliation of the individual ; it grades him, so to 
speak.’’! In British Columbia, ‘ names, apart from the staz 
or nickname, are never used as mere appellations to distin- 
guish one person from another, as among ourselves, nor do 
they seem to have been used ordinarily as terms of address. 
They are primarily terms of relation or affiliation, with his- 
toric and mystic reference. They were reserved for special — 
and ceremonial occasions. The ordinary terms of address ; 
among the Salish tribes, as among other primitive peoples, 
were those expressive of age.’2 With the Kwakiutl, ‘each 
clan has a certain limited number of names. Each individual « 
has only one name at a time. The bearers of these names form 
the nobility of the tribe. When a man receives the totem of. 
his father-in-law, he at the same time receives his name, while. 
the father-in-law gives up the name, and takes what is called 
‘an old man’s name,’ which does not belong to the names 
constituting the nobility of the tribe.”3 Finally, De Groot « 
notes that ‘‘ the Chinese have a tendency to identify names w 
with the persons who bear them, a tendency which may be. 
classed on a level with their inability, already illustrated by \ 
numerous instances, of clearly discriminating between ( 
semblances or symbols and the realities which these call to w 
mind.” 4 | 

This last comparison seems perfectly correct, to my mind, « 
and I think as De Groot does, that the same cause may account M 
for both tendencies. This cause is not to be found in a childish ~ 
association of ideas, however. It is in the collective represen- — 
tations which, forming an integral part of their perception of 
entities, form an integral part also of their perception of the 
likeness and the name which betokens them. The reality of 
the similitude is of the same kind as that of the original—that M 
is, essentially mystic, and it is the same with the reality of the 
name. The two cases are alike except in one point—that 


t Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,”’ E. B. Rept., xi. p. 368. i 
2 Hill Tout, “ Ethnology of the StatlumH of British Columbia,” J.AJ., © 
XXXV. P. 152. | 
3 F. Boas, “ The North-western Tribes of Canada,’’ Reports of the British « 
Association, p. 675 (1898). 
4 The Religious System of China, i. p. 212. 








PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 53 


which appeals to the sight in the first case, appeals to the 
hearing in the second, but otherwise the process is identical. 
The mystic properties in the name are not separated from 
those in the beings they connote. To us the name of a person, 
an animal, a family, a town, has the purely external signifi- 
cance of a label which allows us to discern without any possi- 
bility of confusion who the person is, to what species the 
animal belongs, which family and which town it is. To the 
primitive, however, the designation of the being or object, 
which seems to us the sole function of the name, appears a 
mere accessory and of secondary importance : many observers 
expressly state that that is not the real function of the name. 
To make up for this, there are very important functions of 
which our names are deprived. The name expresses and 
makes real the relationship of the individual with his totemic 
group; with the ancestor of whom he is frequently a rein- 
carnation ; with the particular totem or guardian angel who 
has been revealed to him in a dream ; with the invisible powers 
who protect the secret societies to which he belongs, etc. How 
does this arise? Evidently because beings and objects do not 
present themselves to the primitive’s mind apart from the 
mystic properties which these relations involve.\ As a natural 
consequence, names derive their characteristics from the 
characteristics of these same beings and objects. The name is 
mystic, as the reproduction is mystic, because the perception 
of things, oriented differently from our own, through the 
_ collective representations, is mystic. 

We can therefore extend also to names Cushing’s acute 
reflections, already quoted, with regard to the forms of 
objects. Names condition and define the occult powers of 
| the beings who participate in them. Hence are derived the 
feelings and fears they awaken, and the precautions to which 
these fears lead. The problem is not to discover how the 
simple term ‘‘ is associated ’’ with mystic elements which are 
never separable from it in the minds of primitives. What is 
given is the ensemble of collective representations of a mystic 
nature expressed by the name. The actual problem is to 
ascertain how these collective representations become gradually 
impaired and dissociated, how they have assumed the form of 
“ beliefs ”” less and less closely ‘‘ attached ’’ to the name, until 


54 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the moment arrives when, as with us, it serves but as a 
distinctive designation. 

The primitive is, as we know, no less careful about his 
shadow than he is about his name or his counterfeit present- 
ment. If he were to lose it he would consider himself hope- 


lessly endangered. Should it come into the power of another, : 


he has everything to dread. Folklore of all countries has 


made us familiar with facts of this kind; we shall cite but a © 


few of them only. In the Fiji Islands, as in many places 


inhabited by people of a similar stage of development, it is a | 


mortal insult to walk upon anybody else’s shadow. In East q 


Africa, murders are sometimes committed by means of a knife . 


or nail thrust through the shadow of a man; if the guilty 
person is caught in the act he is executed forthwith. Miss 


Kingsley in reporting this fact, shows clearly to what extent © 


the West African negroes dread the loss of their shadow. ‘It 


strikes one as strange,’’ she writes, ‘‘ to see men who have been © 


walking, say, through forest or grass land, on a blazing hot 
morning quite happily, on arrival at a piece of clear ground or 


_a village square, most carefully go round it, not across, and you © 


will soon notice that they only do this at noontime, and learn 
that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some Bakwiri I 


once came across who were particularly careful in this matter, w 


why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when ~ 


night came down and they disappeared in the surrounding 


darkness, and was told that was all right, because at night all © 
shadows lay down in the shadow of the Great God, and so got « 


stronger. Had I not seen how strong and how long a shadow, ~ 
be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was in the u 


early morning time ?’”’ ! 
De Groot notes similar precautions in China. ‘‘ When the 


| 


lid is about to be placed on the coffin, most of the bystanders | 
not belonging to the nearest kindred retire a few steps, or even « 


make off for the side apartments, as it is dangerous to health 


and detrimental to good luck to have one’s shadow enclosed in ~ 


a coffin.’”’2 What then zs the shadow? It is not the exact 


| 
| 


À 


equivalent of what we call the soul; but it is of the nature of « 


the soul, and where the soul is represented as multiple, the 


1 Mary Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 176. 
2 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. pp. 94, 240. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 


shadow (according to Miss Kingsley) is sometimes one of the 
souls. On his side, De Groot says: “ We find nothing in the 
books of China which points positively to an identification of 
shadows and souls.’’! But, on the other hand, ghosts have 
no shadows. And De Groot concludes by saying: that “the 
shadow is a part of the personality which has an im- 
mense influence on his destiny,” a characteristic which 
applies equally, as we have seen, to a person’s picture or 
his name. 

I shall therefore refer it to the same theory. If we ask 
ourselves: how has the primitive come to associate with the 
idea of his shadow beliefs which we find to be almost universal ? 
we might reply by an ingenious explanation, and one which 
would be psychologically probable, but it would be unsound, 
because the problem cannot be propounded in such terms as 
these. To enunciate it thus would be to imply that the idea 
of his shadow to the primitive is the same as to us, and the 
rest is superimposed: Now it really is nothing like that. 
The perception of the shadow, as of the body itself, like that of 
the image or the name, is a mystic perception, in which that 
which we properly call the shadow,—the design upon the 
ground of a figure which recalls the form of a being or object 
lighted from the opposite side—is only one element among 
many. We have not to discover how the perception of the 
shadow has been placed in juxtaposition or united with such 
and such a representation: these indeed form an integral 
part of the perception, so far as we can trace it in past obser- 
vations. For this reason I should be prepared to take up a 
counter-position to that of De Groot. ‘The Chinese,” he 
says, ‘‘ are even to these days without ideas of the physical 
causation of shadows. . . . They must needs see in a shadow 
something more than a negation of light.’”’2 I, on the con- 
trary, should say: the Chinese, having a mystic perception of 
the shadow, as participating in the life and all the properties 
of the tangible body, cannot represent it as a mere “‘ negation 
of light.” To be able to see a purely physical phenomenon in 
the production of the shadow, it would be necessary to have an 
idea of such a phenomenon, and we know that such an idea is 
lacking to the primitive. In undeveloped communities, there 


1 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, ii. p. 83. 2 Tbid. 


56 HOW NATIVES THINK 


is no perception unaccompanied by mystic qualities and occult 
properties, and why should the shadow be any exception ? 


Finally, the same considerations apply equally to another 
class of phenomena—dreams—which occupy an important 
place in the primitive mind. To primitives the dream is not, 
as it is to us, simply a manifestation of mental activity which 
occurs during sleep, a more or less orderly series of repre- 
sentations to which, when awake, the dreamer would give no 
credence, because they lack the conditions essential to objective 
validity. This last characteristic, though it does not escape 
the primitives, seems to interest them but slightly. On the 
other hand, the dream, to them, is of far greater significance 
than to us. It is first a percept as real as those of the waking 
state, but above all it is a provision of the future, a communi- : 
cation and intercourse with spirits, souls, divinities, a means of: 
establishing a relation with their own special guardian angel, 
and even of discovering who this may be. Their confidence in 
the reality of that which the dreams makes known to them is 
very profound. Tylor, Frazer, and the representatives of the 
English school of anthropology have brought together a vast 
number of facts which bear witness to this, collected by 
investigators of primitive peoples of the most diverse types. 
Shall I, too, quote some? In Australia ‘ Sometimes a man 
dreams that someone has got some of his hair or a piece of his 
food, or of his ’possum rug, or indeed anything almost that he 
has used. If he dreams this several times he feels sure of it 
and calls his friends together, and tells them of his dreaming 
too much about ‘ that man,’ who must have something belong- 
ing to him. . . . Sometimes natives only know about having 
their fat taken out by remembering something of it as in a 
dream.”’ : 

To the North American Indians, dreams, natural or 
induced, have an importance which it would be difficult to 
overestimate. ‘‘ Sometimes it is the rational mind which is 
wandering, whilst the mind which feels continues to animate 
the body. Sometimes the familiar spirit gives wholesome 
advice upon what is about to happen; and sometimes it is a 
visit from the soul of the object of which one dreams. But in 


5 Howitt, ‘ On Australian Medicine-men,” /.4.1., xvi. I, pp. 29-30. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 57 


whatsoever fashion the dream may be conceived, it is always 
regarded as a sacred thing, and as the most usual method 
employed by the gods of making their will known to men. . .. 
Frequently it is an order from the spirits.” In Lejeune’s 
Relations de la Nouvelle France, it is stated that the dream is 
“the god of the heathens’’; and an observer of our own 
times says: “‘ Dreams are to savages what the Bible is to us, 
the source of Divine revelation—with this important difference 
that they can produce this revelation at will by the medium 
of dreams.’’? Consequently the Indian will at once carry out 
. what has been commanded or simply indicated to him in a 
dream. Mooney tells us that among the Cherokees, when a 
man dreams that he has been bitten by a snake, he must 
follow the same treatment as if he had really been bitten, for 
it is a witch-snake that has done the injury, and if he did not, 
swelling and ulceration would ensue, possibly even many 
years later.3 In the Relations de la Nouvelle France we read 
that “a warrior, having dreamed that he had been taken 
prisoner in battle, anxious to avert the fatal consequences of 
such a dream, called all his friends together and implored them 
to help him in this misfortune. He begged them to prove 
themselves true friends by treating him as if he were an enemy. 
They therefore rushed upon him, stripped him naked, fettered 
him, and dragged him through the streets with the usual shouts 
and insults, and even made him mount the scaffold. . . . 
He thanked them warmly, believing that this imaginary 
captivity would ensure him against being made prisoner in 
reality. . . . In another case, a man who had dreamed he saw 
his hut on fire, did not rest till he had witnessed its burning in 
reality. . . . A third, not believing that his dream would be 
sufficiently realistic if he were burned in effigy insisted on 
having fire applied to his legs, as is done with captives about 
to undergo capital punishment. . . . It was fully six months 
before he recovered from the burns.”’ 4 

The Malays of Sarawak never doubt their blood-relation- 


1 Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l'Amérique Septentrionale, iii. 
PP- 353-5. 

2 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 77 (Contributions to North 
American Ethnology, ii. 1). 

3 ** Myths of the Cherokee,”’ E. B. Rept., xix. p. 295. 

4 Années, pp. 46-8 (1661-2), 


58 HOW NATIVES THINK 


ship with a certain animal, if they have dreamed about it. 
‘‘Wan’s great-great-grandfather became blood-brother to a 
crocodile. ... Wan had several times met this crocodile 
in dreams. Thus in one dream he fell into the river where 
there were many crocodiles about. He climbed on to the 
head of one which said to him, ‘ Don’t be afraid,’ and carried 
him to the bank. Wan’s father had charms given him by a 
crocodile and would not on any account kill one, and Wan 
clearly regards himself as being intimately related to crocodiles 
in general.” 1 

In short, to conclude with a peculiarly happy dictum of 
Spencer and Gillen: ‘‘ What a savage experiences during a 


dream is just as real to him as what he sees when he is awake.’’ 2 


To explain these phenomena, are we to rely upon the 


current theory which refers them to a psychological illusion : 


constantly obtaining among primitives? They would be 
unable to distinguish an actual perception from one which, 
though powerful, is merely imaginary. In all cases of life-like 
representation, the belief in the objectivity of this representa- 
tion would appear. Accordingly, the apparition of a dead 
person would induce the belief that he was actually present. 
The representation of one’s own self, in a dream, acting, 
travelling, conversing with persons who are at a distance or 
who have disappeared, would convince one that the soul does 
indeed leave the body during sleep and travels whither it feels 
conscious of going. ‘‘ The supreme confusion in the thought 
of non-civilized individuals,” says Powell, ‘‘ is the confusion of 
the objective with the subjective.” 

Without disputing the general accuracy of the psycho- 
logical law which is invoked here, I should like to point out 
that it does not wholly account for the way in which primitives 
represent their dreams, and the use to which they put them. 
In the first place, they distinguish very clearly between per- 
ceptions which come to them through dreams from those they 
receive in the waking state, however similar they may other- 
wise be. They even recognize different categories of dreams, 


t Hose and Macdougall, “ Relations between Men and Animals in Sara- 
walk? FAL xxi. DA HEOT. 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 451. 


ee 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 59 


and attribute a varying degree of validity to them. ‘The 
Ojibbeways have divided dreams into various classes, and 
given each a special name. The excellent Bishop Baraga, in 
his lexicon of that language, has collected the Indian names 
for a bad dream, an impure dream, an ominous dream, as well 
as for a good or happy dream.”’! ‘The Hidatsa have much 
faith in dreams, but usually regard as oracular only those 
which come after prayer, sacrifice, and fasting.’’2 It is 
therefore with full knowledge of the circumstances and due 
reflection that primitives accord the one kind of perception 
as complete a credence as the other. Instead of saying, as 
people do, that primitives believe in what they perceive in the 
dream, although it is but a dream, I should say that they 
believe in it because it is a dream. The “illusion ” theory 
does not suffice. How do we account for the fact that, know- 
ing well that the dream 7s a dream, they should nevertheless 
rely upon it? This cannot be explained as a mere psycho- 
logical process effected in the individual. Here again, we are 
obliged to take into account the collective representations 
which make both the perception and the dream something 
entirely different for the primitive from what they would be 
for us. 

Our perception is directed towards the apprehension of an 
objective reality, and this reality alone. It eliminates all that 
might be of merely subjective importance, and in this it is in 
contrast with the dream. We do not understand how any- 
thing that is seen in a dream can be placed on a par with that 
which we see in the waking state: and if such a thing does 
occur we are forced to believe that it is the result of a very 
strong psychological illusion. But. with the primitives there 
is no such violent contrast as this. Their perception is 
oriented in another fashion, and in it that which we call objec- 
tive reality is united and mingled with, and often regulated 
by, mystic, imperceptible elements which we nowadays 
characterize as subjective. In this way, in fact, it is closely 
related to the dream. Or, if we prefer to put it thus, we may 
say that their dream is a perception like the others. It isa 
compound into which the same elements enter, which awakens 


t Kohl, Kitcht Gama: Wanderings round Lake Superior, p. 236. 
3 Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,” E. B. Rept., xi. p. 516. 


60 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the same sentiments, and which even impels to action. Thus 
the Indian who has a dream and risks his existence upon its 
truth, is not ignorant of the difference between this dream and 
a similar perception which he might have in his waking state. 
But, since his perception in the waking state and in the dream 
are alike mystic, this difference means very little to him. In 
our eyes, the objective reality of the perception is the measure 
of its validity ; in his, such a consideration is only secondary, 
or rather, is of no importance at all. 

That which to us is perception is to him mainly the com- 
munication with spirits, souls, invisible and intangible 
mysterious powers encompassing him on all sides, upon which 
his fate depends, and which loom larger in his consciousness 
than the fixed and tangible and visible elements of his repre- 
sentations. He has therefore no reason to depreciate the 


dream, and consider it as a subjective and dubious representa- ~ 


tion, in which he must place no trust. The dream is not a 
form of inferior and illusory perception. On the contrary, it 
is a highly favoured form, one in which, since its material and 
tangible elements are at a minimum, the communication 
with invisible spirits and forces is most direct and most 
complete. 

This accounts for the confidence which the primitive has in 
his dreams, a confidence which is at least as great as that he 
accords his ordinary perceptions. It accounts also for his 
seeking after means of procuring dreams which shall be revela- 
tory and, among the North American Indians, for instance, 
for the whole technique of securing the sincerity and validity 
of dreams. Thus the young man, arrived at the age of initia- 
tion, who is going to try and see in a dream the animal which 
will be his guardian angel, his personal totem, has to prepare 
himself for this purpose by carrying out a series of observances. 
“ He first purifies himself by the mpi or steam bath, and by 
fasting for a term of three days. During the whole of this 
time, he avoids women and society, is secluded in his habits 
and endeavours in every way to be pure enough to receive a 
revelation from the deity whom he invokes” . . . then he 
subjects himself to various tortures “until the deities have 
vouchsafed him a vision or revelation.” 1 

t Dorsey, “ Siouan Cults,” E. B. Rept., xi. pp. 436-7. 


OE ES ON PE 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 61 


This, too, accounts for the deference and respect shown to 
dreamers, seers, prophets, sometimes even to lunatics. A 
special power of communicating with invisible reality, that is, 
a peculiarly privileged perception, is attributed to them. All 
these well-known facts naturally result from the orientation of 
the collective representations which obtains in primitive 
peoples, and which endows with mysticism both the real 
world in which the “ savage’ dwells, and his perception of it. 


III 


Further differences between the primitives’ perception and 
our own arise out of this mystic character. To us one of the 
essential signs by which we recognize the objective validity of 
a perception is that the being or phenomenon perceived 
appears to all alike under the same conditions. If, forinstance, 
one person alone among a number present hears a certain 
sound repeatedly, or sees an object close by, we say that he or 
she is subject to delusions, or has a hallucination. Leibniz, 
Taine, and many others have insisted upon the agreement 
between the subjects who are perceiving as a means of distin- 
guishing between real ‘‘ and imaginary phenomena.”’ Current 
opinion on this point, too, is wholly on the side of the philo- 
sophers. With the primitives, on the contrary, it constantly 
happens that beings or things manifest themselves to certain 
persons to the exclusion of others who may be present. No 
one is astonished at this, for all regard it as perfectly natural. 
Howitt writes, for instance: ‘‘ Of course, the Ngarang was 
invisible to all but the wivarap (medicine-man).” 1 A young 
medicine-man in training, who is telling of his initiation, 
remarks: ‘‘ After that I used to see things that my mother 
could not see. When out with her I would say ‘ Mother, what 
is that out there yonder?’ She used to say ‘ Child, there is 
nothing.” These were the jir (or ghosts) which I began to 
see.’’? The aborigines observed by Spencer and Gillen think 
that during the night the sun visits the place where it arises in 
the morning, ‘and that it might actually be seen at night 
times by . . . clever medicine-men, and the fact that it can 


t Howitt, ‘‘ On Some Australian Medicine-men,” /.A.1., xvi. i. p. 42. 
2 Ibid., p. 50. 


62 HOW NATIVES THINK 


not be seen by ordinary persons only means that they are not 
gifted with sufficient power, and not that it is not there.” 
In their case, as with many other aggregates of the same stage 
of development, the medicine-man extracts from the body of 
the sufferer a small object only visible to the operator. “‘ After 
much mysterious searching he finds and cuts the string which 
is invisible to everyone except himself. There is not a doubt 
amongst the onlookers as to its having been there.’’? In the 
form of witchcraft which the Australian aborigines called 
‘““ pointing the death bone,’’ a complicated series of operations 
would be carried on without anyone’s perceiving them. ‘ The 
blood of the victim, in some fashion which is unperceived, 
flows from him to the medicine-man, and thence to the 
receptacle where it is collected; at the same time, by a 
corresponding movement a bone, a magic stone proceeds 
from the body of the sorcerer to the body of his victim—-still 
invisibly—-and, entering there, induces a fatal malady.”’ 3 

We find the same beliefs in Eastern Siberia. ‘In the 
Alarsk department of the Government of Irkutsk... if . 
anyone’s child becomes dangerously ill, the Buryats.. . 
believe that the crown of his head is being sucked by Onok- 
hoi, a small beast in the form of a mole or cat. . . . No one 
except the shaman can see this beast.”’ 4 

In North America, among the Klamaths of Oregon, the 
kiuks (medicine-man) who is called to treat a case of disease 
must consult the spirits of certain animals. ‘‘ Such persons 
only as have been trained during five years for the profession 
of conjurers can see these spirits, but by them they are seen as 
clearly as we see the objects around us.’’5 ‘‘ Dwarfs can be 
seen only by those initiated into the mysteries of witchcraft.’’ 6 
Among the Tarahumares “large serpents, which only the 
shaman can see, are thought to live in the rivers. They have 
horns and very big eyes.” 7 ‘The great Hikuli’’ (a sacred 
plant personified) “‘ eats with the shaman, who alone is able to 

t The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 561-2. 

2 Ibid., p. 532. 

3 W. E. Roth, Ethnological Studies among the N.W. Central Queensland 
Aborigines, No. 264. 
_ 4 V. Mikhailovski, Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, analysed 
100 I RIVE D. 00 UCI Fp 14%: 


5 À. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. xcviii. «Ibid; Pickem 
7 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, i. p. 340. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 63 


see him and his companions.’’! In one of the Huichol cere- 
monies, the heads of the does are placed with the heads of the 
bucks, because they, too, have horns, “though only the 
shaman sees them.”’ 2 

All such phenomena are to be expected if it be true that 
the perception of primitives is oriented differently from our 
own, and not pre-eminently concerned, as ours is, with the 
characteristics of the beings and manifestations which we call 
objective. To them the most important properties of the 
beings and objects they perceive, are their occult powers, their 
mystic qualities. Now one of these powers is that of appearing 
or not appearing in given circumstances. Either the power is 
inherent in the subject who perceives, who has been prepared 
for it by initiation, or else holds it by virtue of his participa- 
tion in some superior being, and so on. In short, mystic 
relations may be established between certain persons and 
certain beings, on account of which these persons are exclu- 
sively privileged to perceive these beings. Such cases are 
analogous to the dream. The primitive, far from regarding 
the mystic perception in which he has no part, as suspect, sees 
init, as in the dream, a more precious, and consequently more 
significant communication with invisible spirits and forces. 


IV 


Conversely, when collective representations imply the 
presence of certain qualities in objects, nothing will persuade 
the primitives that they do not exist. To us, the fact that we 
do not perceive them there is decisive. It does not prove to 
them that they are not there, for possibly it is their nature not 
to reveal themselves to perception, or to manifest themselves 
in certain conditions only. Consequently, that which we call 
experience, and which decides, as far as we are concerned, 
what may be admitted or not admitted as real, has no effect 
upon collective representations. Primitives have no need of 
this experience to vouch for the mystic properties of beings 
and objects: and for the same reason they are quite indifferent 
to the disappointments it may afford. Since experience is 


1 C, Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, p. 372. 
2 Id., Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, p. 68. 


64 HOW NATIVES THINK 


limited to what is stable, tangible, visible, and approachable 
in physical reality, it allows the most important of all, the 
occult powers, to escape. Hence we can find no example of 
the non-success of a magic practice discouraging those who 
believe in it. Livingstone gives an account of a prolonged 
discussion which he had with the rain-makers, and ends by 
saying: ‘I have never been able to convince a single one of 
them that their arguments are unsound. Their belief in these 
‘charms’ of theirs is unbounded.’’! In the Nicobar Islands, 
“the people in all the villages have now performed the cere- 
mony called tanangla, signifying either ‘support’ or ‘ pre- 
vention.’ Its object is to prevent illness caused by the north- 
east monsoon. Poor Nicobarese! They do the same thing 
year after year, but to no effect.” 2 

Experience is peculiarly unavailing against the belief in the 
virtues of “‘ fetishes ’’ which secure invulnerability : a method 
of interpreting what happens in a sense which favours the 
belief is never lacking. In one case an Ashanti, having pro- 
cured a fetish of this kind, hastened to put it to the proof, and 
received a gunshot wound which broke his arm. The “ fetish 
man ’’ explained the matter to the satisfaction of all, saying 
that the incensed fetish had that moment revealed the reason 
to him. It was because the young man had had sexual rela- 
tions with his wife on a forbidden day. The wounded man 
confessed that this was true, and the Ashantis retained their 
convictions.3 Du Chaillu tells us that when a native wears an 
iron chain round his neck he is proof against bullets. If the 
charm is not effectual, his faith in it remains unshaken, for 
then he believes that some maleficent wonder-worker has 
produced a powerful ‘‘ counter-spell,”’ to which he falls a 
victim.4 Elsewhere he says: ‘‘ As I came from seeing the 
king, I shot at a bird sitting upon a tree, and missed it. I had 
been taking quinine, and was nervous. But the negroes 
standing around at once proclaimed that this was a fetish-bird, 
and therefore I could not shoot it. I fired again, and missed 
again. Hereupon they grew triumphant in their declarations, 
while I. . . loaded again, took careful aim, and to my own 


t Missionary Travels, pp. 24-5 (1857). 

2 Solomon, ‘‘ Diaries kept in Cap Nicobar,” J.A.I., xxxii. p. 213. 
3 Bowditch, Mission to Ashanti, p. 439. 

+ Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, p. 338. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 65 


satisfaction and their dismay, brought my bird down. 
Immediately they explained that I was a white man, and not 
entirely amenable to fetish laws ; so that I do not suppose my 
shot proved anything to them after all.” ! 

It is the same in Loango. ‘I had been presented,” writes 
Pechuél-Loesche, ‘‘ with a very fine collar, made of hair from 
the tail of an elephant . . . and adorned with teeth from a 
sea-fish and a crocodile. These teeth were to preserve me from 
any danger connected with water. . . . It frequently hap- 
pened that my boat was upset when I was crossing the bar, 
and one day I had great difficulty in reaching the shore. I 
was told quite seriously that it was the teeth alone that had 
saved me, for without them my swimming powers would not 
have sufficed to help me clear the heavy breakers. JI was not 
wearing the collar, but its efficacy was in no manner of doubt 
from that fact’? The fetish and the medicine-man always 
have the last word. | Jo 

Primitive man, therefore, lives and acts in an environment 
of beings and objects, all of which, in addition to the properties 
that we recognize them to possess, are endued with mystic 
attributes. He perceives their objective reality mingled with 
another reality. He feels himself surrounded by an infinity 
of imperceptible entities, nearly always invisible to sight, and 
always redoubtable : ofttimes the souls of the dead are about 
him, and always he is encompassed by myriads of spirits of 
more or less defined personality. It is thus at least that the 
matter is explained by a large number of observers and anthro- 
pologists, and they make use of animistic terms to express 
this. Frazer has collected many instances which tend to show 
that this phenomenon obtains everywhere among undeveloped 
peoples.3 Is it necessary to quote some of them? “ The 
Orâon’s imagination tremblingly wanders in a world of ghosts. 
Every rock, road, river, and grove is haunted.” .. . Some- 
times, too, there are ‘‘ malignant spirits.’ 4 Like the Santals, 
Mundas, and the Ordons of Chota-Nagpur, ‘the Kadars 
believe themselves to be compassed about by a host of 
invisible powers, some of whom are thought to be the spirits 


t Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, p. 179. 
2 Die Loango-Expedition, ili. 2, Pp. 352. 

3 The Golden Bough (2nd edit.), ili. pp. 41 et seq. 

4 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, 11, pp. 143-5. 


5 


66 - HOW NATIVES THINK 


of departed ancestors, while others seem to embody nothing 
more definite than the vague sense of the mysterious and 
uncanny with which hills, streams, and lonely forests inspire 
the savage imagination. . . . Their names are legion, and 
their attributes barely known.’”’! In Korea, “ spirits occupy 
every quarter of heaven and every foot of earth. They lie in 
wait for a man along the wayside, in the trees, on the rocks, 
in the mountains, valleys, and streams. They keep him under 
a constant espionage day and night. . . . They are all about 
him, they dance in front of him, follow behind him, fly over 
his head and cry out against him from the earth. He has no 
refuge from them even in his own house, for there they are 
plastered into or pinned on the walls or tied to the beams. . . . 
Their ubiquity is an ugly travesty of the omnipresence of 
God.’ In China, according to the ancient doctrine, “ the 
universe is filled up in all its parts with legions of shen and 
kwei. . . . Every being and every thing that exists is animated 
either by a shen, or bya kwet, or by ashen and a kweï together.” 3 
With the Fang of East Africa, ‘spirits are everywhere; in - 
rocks, trees, forests, and streams; in fact, for the Fang, this 
life is one continual fight against spirits corporal and 
spiritual.’ 4 ‘In every action of his daily life,” writes Miss 
Kingsley, ‘‘ the African negro shows you how he lives with a 
great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him 
before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his 
weapons to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to 
them the while ; telling them what care he has taken of them, 
reminding them of the gifts he has given them, though these 
gifts were hard for him to give, and begging them in the hour 
of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will see him bending 
over the face of a river talking to its spirit with proper incan- 
tations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of his 
to upset his canoe, or drown him, or asking it to carry down 
with 7 some curse to the village below which has angered 
him.” 

Miss Kingsley lays great stress upon the homogeneity of the 


t Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, i. p. 369. 

2 G. H. Jones, ‘‘ The Spirit Worship in Korea,” Transactions of the Korea 
Byanch of the Royal Asiatic Society, ii. i. p. 58 

Py M de Groot, The Religious System of China, iv. p. 51. 

4 Bennett, “‘ Ethnographical Notes on the Fang,” /.A.1., xxix. p. 87. 

5 West African Studies, p. 110. 


PRIMITIVES’ PERCEPTIONS 67 


African native’s representations of everything. ‘ The African 
mind naturally approaches all things from a spiritual point of 
view . . . things happen because of the action of spirit upon 
spirit.” When the doctor applies a remedy “the spirit of 
the medicine works upon the spirit of the disease.’’ The 
purely physical effect is beyond the power of conception unless 
it be allied with the mystic influence. Or rather, we may say 
that there is no really physical influence, there are only mystic 
ones. Accordingly it is almost impossible to get these primi- 
tives to differentiate, especially when it is a case of an accu- 
sation of murder through the practice of witchcraft, for 
instance. Here is a typical case. ‘I explain to my native 
questioner,’’ says Nassau, ‘‘ that if what the accused has done 
in fetich rite with intent to kill, had any efficiency in taking 
away life, I allow that he shall be put to death; if he made 
only fetiches, even if they were intended to kill, he is not 
guilty of this death, for a mere fetich cannot kill. But if he 
used poison, with or without fetich, he is guilty.” 

‘ But even so,” adds Nassau, “‘ the distinction between a 
fetich and a poison is vague in the thought of many natives. 
What I call a ‘ poison’ is to them only another material form 
of a fetich power, both poison and fetich being supposed to be 
made efficient by the presence of an adjuvant spirit.””2. This 
means that to their minds the mere fetich kills as certainly as 
the poison does. More certainly even; for the poison kills 
only by virtue of a mystic power of which, in certain circum- 
stances, it may be deprived. The idea of its physical 
properties which is so clear to the European mind, does not 
exist for the African. 

We thus have good authority for saying that this mentality 
differs from our own to a far greater extent than the language 
used by those who are partisans of animism would lead us to 
think. When they are describing to us a world peopled by 
ghosts and spirits and phantoms for primitives, we at once 
realize that beliefs of this kind have not wholly disappeared 
even in civilized countries. Without referring to spiritualism, 
we recall the ghost-stories which are so numerous in our folk- 
lore, and we are tempted to think that the difference is one of 
degree only. Doubtless such beliefs may be regarded in our 


t West African Studies, p. 330. 2 Fetichism in West Africa, p. 263. 


68 HOW NATIVES THINK 


communities as a survival which testifies to an older mental 
condition, formerly much more general. But we must be 
careful not to see in them a faithful, though faintly outlined, 
reflection of the mentality of primitives. Even the most 
uneducated members of our societies regard stories of ghosts 
and spirits as belonging to the realm of the supernatural : 
between such apparitions and magical influences and the data 
furnished by ordinary perception and the experience of the 
broad light of day, the line of demarcation is clearly defined. 
Such a line, however, does not exist for the primitive. The 
one kind of perception and influence is quite as natural as the 
other, or rather, we may say that to him there are not two 
kinds. The superstitious man, and frequently also the 
religious man, among us, believes in a twofold order of reality, 
the one visible, palpable, and subordinate to the essential laws 
of motion; the other invisible, intangible, “ spiritual,” form- 
ing a mystic sphere which encompasses the first. But the 
primitive’s mentality does not recognize two distinct worlds 
in contact with each other, and more or less interpenetrating. © 
To him there is but one. Every reality, like every influence, 
is mystic, and consequently every perception is also mystic. 


CHAPTER II 
THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 


I 


Ir the primitives’ collective representations differ from ours 
through their essentially mystic character ; if their mentality 
as I have endeavoured to show, is oriented in another direc- 
tion than our own; we must admit, too, that their repre- 
sentations are not connected with each other as ours would be. 
Must we then infer that these representations obey some 
other system of logic than the one which governs our own 
understanding ? That would be going too far, for such a 
hypothesis would exceed that which facts warrant us in 
affirming. Nothing proves that the connections of collective 
representations must depend solely upon laws of a logical 
kind. Moreover, the idea of a logic different from our own 
could only provide us with a negative concept, devoid of mean- 
ing. Now as a matter of fact we can at least endeavour to 
comprehend how representations are connected in the minds 
of primitives. We understand their language, we make 
bargains with them, we succeed in interpreting their insti- 
tutions and their belief: all this shows that there is a possible 
transition, a practicable method of communication between 
their mentality and our own, 

With these exceptions, however, the mentalities are 
different, and the disparity becomes the more perceptible 
as the comparative study advances, and the documentary 
evidence admits of its being extended. The explorer who 
travels rapidly through communities of an uncivilized type 
has no time to probe into this problem; in fact, he scarcely 
ever thinks of it as such. First, he ascertains the curious 
persistence of certain traits of human nature, manifesting 
themselves in the most varied conditions, and he then expresses 


70 HOW NATIVES THINK 


his surprise when brought face to face with methods of think- 
ing and acting of which both the origin and reason escape 
him. He leaves to his reader the task of discovering how 
these successive impressions may be reconciled, or else he con- 
fines himself to some general ‘‘ explanations ’’ derived from 
traditional psychology and logic, if he happens to possess a 
smattering of either. 

But when we listen to observers who have lived for a 
longer time among primitives, and especially those who have 
endeavoured to penetrate their method of thinking and 
feeling, we hear something quite different. Whether it be 
the North American Indians (of whom Cushing and Powell 
tell us), the negroes of the French Congo (studied by Miss 
Kingsley), the Maoris of New Zealand (known to Elsdon 
Best), or any other “primitive” people whatever, a “ civilized 
being ’’ can never expect to see his thought following exactly 
the same course as that of the primitive, nor to find again 
the path by which the latter has travelled. “The mentality 
of the Maori is of an intensely mystical nature. ... We 
hear of many singular theories about Maori beliefs and Maori 
thought, but the truth is that we do not understand either, 
and, what is more, we never shall. We shall never know the 
inwardness of the native mind. For that would mean retracing 
our steps for many centuries, back into the dim past, far back 
to the time when we also possessed the mind of primitive 
man. And the gates have long closed on that hidden road.” # 

Cushing had acquired a kind of mental “ naturalization ” 
among the Zuñis. Not content with living with, and like, 
them for many years, he had made their religious rulers adopt 
him and admit him to their secret societies; in their sacred 
ceremonies he, like their priests, had his own rôle, and carried 
it out. The unfortunately rare works of his which have been 
published give us, however, the feeling of a form of mental 
activity with which our own would never exactly correspond. 
Our habits of thought are too far removed from those of 
the Zuñis. Our language, without which we can conceive 
nothing, and which is essential to our reasoning, makes use 
of categories which do not coincide with theirs. Lastly and 


t Elsdon Best, “ Maori Medical Lore,’’ Journal of the Polynesian Society, 
xiii. P. 219 (1904). 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION TI 


chiefly, the ambient social reality, of which the collective 
representations and, to a certain extent, the language, are 
functions, is with them too far removed from our own case. 
Thus the mentality of inferior peoples, though not so 
impenetrable as it would be as if it were regulated by a logic | 
different from our own, is none the less not wholly com- 
prehensible to us. We are led to imagine that it does not 
exclusively obey the laws of ow logic, nor possibly of any laws 
which are wholly logical. An analysis of some characteristic 
phenomena may perhaps serve to throw light on this point. 
Observers have frequently collected the arguments, or 
rather, the connections between representations which have 
seemed strange and inexplicable to them. I shall quote but 
a few instances. ‘‘ A certain drought at Landana was attri- 
buted to the missionaries wearing a certain kind of cap during 
the services: the natives said that this stopped the rain, a 
great outcry that the missionaries must leave the country 
was raised. . . . The missionaries showed the native princes 
their own garden, that their cultivation was being ruined for 
want of water, and asked if it was probable that they would 
spoil their own crops. The natives remained unconvinced, 
and only when the rains at length fell plentifully did the excite- 
ment subside.” Pechuël-Loesche relates an exactly similar 
case, and adduces enough analogous facts to allow of our 
generalizing on the matter. ‘‘ After the Catholic missionaries 
had landed, there was a scarcity of rain, and the plantations 
were suffering from drought. The people at once took it into 
their heads that this was the fault of these clerics, and especi- 
ally due to the long robes they wore, for such had never been 
seen before. There was besides a white horse which had 
recently been landed, and it had prevented trading, and occa- 
sioned many troublesome discussions. A contractor had a 
great deal of trouble because he had replaced the pole of native 
wood which was badly warped, upon which his flag was erected, 
by an upright mast which had just been imported. A shiny 
mackintosh coat, an unusual hat, a rocking-chair, any instru- 
ment whatever, can give rise to disquieting suspicions. The 
entire coast population may be disturbed at the sight of a 
sailing-ship with unfamiliar rigging, or a steamer which has 
t Philips, ‘‘ The Lower Congo,” J.A.J., xvii. p. 220. 


72 HOW NATIVES THINK 


one more funnel than the others. If anything vexatious 
should occur, it is at once attributed to something unusual 
that has taken place.” ! 

In New Guinea, “‘ at the time my wife and I took up our 
residence in Motumotu,” writes Edelfelt, “a kind of pleurisy 
epidemic prevailed along the coast. . . . Of course my wife 
and I were accused of bringing the messenger of destruction, 
and for this loud rumours were about that we—including 
the Polynesian teachers—should suffer death. . . . Somegne 
or something was still the cause of it, and they blamed a poor 
unfortunate sheep I had, that was killed to please them; 
but the epidemic raged as violently as ever. Now our two 
goats were blamed; these animals, however, lived it all out. 
Finally, they levelled their abuse and accusations against a 
large picture of Queen Victoria, which hung in our dining- 
room. Previous to the epidemic appearing people came in 


from long distances to see this picture, and . . . would . 
look at it several hours at a time. . . . The harmless image © 
of our gracious Queen became eventually . . . an imaginary 


destroyer of health and life, and they requested me to take 
the picture down ; to this I did not concede.”’ 2 

At Tanna, in the New Hebrides, “‘it can hardly be said 
that there is any sequence of ideas, properly so called. Ifa 
person were passing along a path, and some creature (say a 
snake) fell on him out of a tree, and next day, or “the week 
after, he heard of the death of a son in Queensland, he would 
connect the two. A turtle came ashore one night and laid 
a nestful of eggs. It was captured in the act. * Such a thing 
had never taken place in the memory of the people. The 
conclusion was that Christianity was the cause of the turtle 
coming ashore to lay its eggs, and the right thing to do was 
to offer the turtle ss the missionary who had brought the 
worship of Jehovah.” 

Ideas are linked Fe in the same way in North America. 
“One evening, when talking about the animals of the country, 
I wanted to let them know that we had rabbits and leverets 

1 Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, p. 83. 

a ‘ Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,’ Proceedings of 
Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland Branch, vii. p. 1 


(1891-2). 
3 Gray, “ Notes on the Natives of Tanna,”’ J/.AJ., xxviii. p. 131. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 73 


in France, and I showed them to them by making the shadow 
on the wall in the firelight. It happened quite by chance 
that they caught more fish than usual the next morning ; 
they believed that the shadow pictures I had made for them 
were the cause of this, and they begged me to do this every 
evening and to teach them how, a thing which I refused to 
do, as I would not minister to this foolish superstition of 
theirs.’’ 2 
. Lastly, in New Guinea. ‘‘ A man returning from hunting 

or fishing is disappointed at his empty game-bag, or canoe, 
and turns over in his mind how to discover who would be 
likely to have bewitched his nets. He perhaps raises his 
eyes and sees a member of a neighbouring friendly village 
on his way to pay a visit. It at once occurs to him that 
this man is the sorcerer, and watching his opportunity, he 
suddenly attacks him and kills him.” 2 | 

The current explanation of such phenomena consists of 
saying that primitives apply the principle of causality undis- 
cerningly, and that they confound cause and antecedent. | 
This would be the very common logical fallacy known as the} 
fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The primitives, we are 
told, have not the least idea that this can be wrong. That 
the representations are consecutive in their minds is a sufficient 
guarantee that they are connected: or rather, they do not 
consider the connection needs any guarantee. The observers 
themselves frequently suggest this explanation. “To 
natives,’ says Pechuél-Loesche, “there is no such thing 
as chance. Oécurrences which are close together in point of 
time, even if widely removed in space, readily appear to 
them to be linked by a causal relation.” 3 

It is true, and later on we shall discover the reason for. 
it, that there is no such thing as chance to the primitive. 
As for the rest, the explanation suggested, if not wholly 
incorrect, is assuredly incomplete. Primitives are undoubtedly 
prone, as much as, and possibly more than, civilized beings, 
to the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. But in the facts 
I have quoted, some simple cases from a very large number 


1 Father Sagard, Le Grand Voyage au Pays des Hurons, pp. 256-7 (1632). 
a Guise, ‘‘ Wangela River, New Guinea,” J.A.J., xxviii. p. 212. 
3 Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, Pp. 333. 


74 HOW NATIVES THINK 


of instances there is something more and something different ; 
it is not merely an artless and erroneous application of the 
principle of causality. It is not only direct anteriority in 
time which makes the connection between one fact and 
another. The sequence perceived or remarked may suggest 
the connection, but the connection itself is not in any way 
confused with this sequence. It consists in a mystic relation 
which the primitive represents to himself—and of which he is 
convinced as soon as he represents it to himself—between 
the antecedent and the consequent: the first having the 
power to produce the second and make it apparent. This 
is a result of the very facts related by Pechuél-Loesche, if 
we regard them in the light of what has already been established 
respecting the mystic properties in the forms taken by persons 
and things.t What effects may not the mystic virtues of a 
cassock, a steamer with three funnels, a mackintosh, a tent- 
pole, in short, any unusual object produce ? Who knows 
the consequences which may arise from their very presence ? _ 
‘‘ Anything strange is uncanny to the native,” say Spencer 
and Gillen.2 In the case of Queen Victoria’s portrait, the 
fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc is obviously an inadequate 
explanation. The portrait was well known to the natives 
long before the epidemic broke out. They did not attach 
any blame to it except in the fourth place, after having suc- 
cessively imputed the outbreak to the missionary, his sheep, 
and his two goats. If, after that, they laid the trouble at 
its door, it was undoubtedly because of the magic power 
they believed to be attaching to this unusual object. The 
case of the Hurons, related by Sagard, can be similarly 
explained. 

To comprehend facts such as these, and refer them to one 
common principle, we must go back to the mystic nature of 
the collective representations in the mentality of undeveloped 
peoples and look for the same characteristic in the connec- 
tions between them. The sequence in time is one element 
of the connection, but it is not always a necessary element, 
and it is never all-sufficing. If it were otherwise, how could 
we explain the fact that the most unvarying and most evident 


1 Vide Chap. I. pp. 41- 
2 The Northern Tribes of otis Australia, pp. 31-2. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 75 


sequences in phenomena so often escape the notice of primi- 
tives? For instance, “‘ the Ja-Luo believe that the sun goes 
back to the east overhead during the night, hidden behind 
the heavens. They do not associate the daylight sky with the 
light of the sun, but look upon it as something quite distinct, 
and asked what became of it at night.’’! 

Dobrizhoffer points out that the Abipones are often unable 
to comprehend direct and self-evident relations between 
cause and effect. ‘A wound inflicted with a spear often 
gapes so wide that it affords ample room for life to go out and 
death to come in; yet if the man dies of the wound, they 
really believe him killed, not by a weapon, but by the deadly 
arts of the jugglers. . . . They are persuaded that the juggler 
will be banished from amongst the living, and made to atone 
for their relation’s death, if the heart and tongue be pulled 
out of the dead man’s body immediately after his decease, 
roasted at the fire, and given to dogs to devour. Though so 
many hearts and tongues are devoured, and they never observe 
any of the jugglers die, yet they religiously adhere to the 
custom of their ancestors by cutting out the hearts and tongues 
of infants and adults of both sexes, as soon as they have 
expired.”’ 2 

Thus not only does the time sequence in phenomena of 
the most impressive kind often remain unperceived by the 
primitive’s mind, but he frequently believes firmly in an order 
of succession which is not borne out by experience, for experi- 
ence can no more undeceive primitives than it can teach 
them. In an infinite number of cases, as we have seen, their 
minds are impervious to experience. Therefore when they 
make the cassocks of the missionaries responsible for the 
drought, or attribute an epidemic to a portrait, it is not merely 
the sequence in point of time which impresses their minds and 
becomes a causal relation to, them. The mental process 
is a different and rather more complex one. That which we 
call experience and the natural order of phenomena does not 
find in primitives, minds prepared to receive and be impressed 
by it. On the contrary, their minds are already preoccupied 


t Hobley, “‘ British East Africa, Kavirondo and Nandi,” /.A.J., XXXiiil. 


P. 358. ; 4 
2 An Account of the Abtpones, il. p. 223. 


76 HOW NATIVES THINK 


with a large number of collective representations, by virtue 
of which objects, whatever they may be, living beings, inani- 
mate objects, or articles manufactured by man, always present 
themselves charged with mystic properties. Consequently 
while these minds are very often unheedful of the objective 
relations, they pay great attention to the mystic connections, 
whether virtual or actual. These preformed connections are 
not derived from the experience of the present, and experience 
is powerless against them. 


IT 


Let us then no longer endeavour to account for these con- 
nections either by the mental weakness of primitives, or by 
the association of ideas, or by a naïve application of the principle 
of causality, or yet by the fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc ; 
in short, let us abandon the attempt to refer their mental 
activity to an inferior variety of our own. Rather let us 
consider these connections in themselves, and see whether 
they do not depend upon a general law, a common founda- 
tion for those mystic relations which primitive mentality 
so frequently senses in beings and objects. Now there is one 
element which is never lacking in : such relations. In varying 
forms and degrees they all involve a ‘ ‘participation ’’ between 
persons or objects which form part of a collective representation. 
For this reason I shall, in default of a better term, call the 
principle which is peculiar to “ primitive” mentality, which 
governs the connections and the preconnections of such 
representations, the law of participation. 

At the moment it would be difficult to formulate this 
law in abstract terms. It will be sufficiently defined in the 
course of this chapter, although that which we desire to define 
scarcely enters the ordinary framework of our thought. 
However, in default of a wholly satisfactory formula, we can 
make an attempt to approximate it. I should be inclined 
to say that in the collective representations of primitive 
mentality, objects, beings, phenomena_can be, though. ina 
way incomprehensible to_us, both themselves and. something 
other than themselves. In a fashion which is no less incom- 
prehensible, they give forth and they receive mystic powers, 


QC 
} à 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 77 


virtues, qualities, influences, which make themselvés. felt 
outside, without ceasing to remain where they are. | 


In other words, the opposition between the one and the à 


many, the same and another, and so forth, does not impose 
upon this mentality the necessity of affirming one of the 
terms if the other be denied, or vice versa. This opposition 
is of but secondary interest. Sometimes it is perceived, and 
. frequently, too, it is not. It often disappears entirely before 
the mystic community of substance in entities which, in our 
thought, could not be confused without absurdity. For 
instance, “the Trumai (a tribe of Northern Brazil) say that 
they are aquatic animals.—The Bororo (a neighbouring 
tribe) boast that they are red araras (parakeets). This 
does not merely signify that after their death they become 
araras, nor that araras are metamorphosed Bororos, and must 
be treated as such. It is something entirely different. “The 
Bororos,’”’ says Von den Steinen, who would not believe it, 
but finally had to give in to their explicit affirmations, ‘give 
one rigidly to understand that they are araras at the present 
time, just as if a caterpillar declared itself to be a butterfly.”’! 
It is not a name they give themselves, nor a relationship 
that they claim. What they desire to express by it is actual 
identity. That they can be both the human beings they 
are and the birds of scarlet plumage at the same time, Von 
den Steinen regards as inconceivable, but to the mentality 
that is governed by the law of participation there is no diffi- 
culty in the matter. All communities which are totemic 
in form admit of collective representations of this kind, implying 
similar identity of the individual members of a totemic group 
and their totem. 

From the dynamic standpoint also, the creation of entities 
and phenomena, the manifestation of such and such an occur- 
rence, are the result of a mystic influence which is communi- 
cated, under conditions themselves of mystic nature, from one 
being or object to another. They depend upon a participation 
which is represented in very varied forms: contact, trans- 
ference, sympathy, telekinesis, etc. In many aggregates 
of an undeveloped type the abundance of game, fish, or fruit, 
the regularity of the seasons, and the rainfall, are connected 


: K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvilkern Zentralbräsiliens, pp. 305-6. 


78 HOW NATIVES THINK 


with the performance of certain ceremonies by individuals 
destined thereto, or to the presence or to the well-being of a 
sacred personality who possesses a special mystic power. 
Qr yet again, the newborn child feels the effects of everything 
its father does, what he eats, etc. The Indian, out hunting 
or engaged in warfare, is fortunate or unfortunate according 
to whether his wife, left behind in the camp, eats, or abstains 
from eating, certain foods, or is doing or not doing certain 
things. The collective representations abound in relations 
of this nature. What we call the natural relation of cause 
and effest passes unnoticed, or is of but slight importance. 
It is the mystic participations which are in the front rank, 
and frequently occupy the whole field. 

On this account the mentality of primitives may be called 
prelogical with as good reason as it may be termed mystic. 
These are two aspects of the same fundamental quality, rather 
than two distinct characteristics. If we take the content of 
the representations more particularly into account, we shall 
call it mystic—and, if the connections are the chief considera- _ 
tion, we pronounce it prelogical. By prelogical we do not mean 
to assert that such a mentality constitutes a kind of antecedent 
stage, in point of time, to the birth of logical thought. Have 
there ever existed groups of human or pre-human beings 
whose collective representations have not yet been subject 
to the laws of logic? We do not know, and in any case, it 
seems to be very improbable. At any rate, the mentality 
of these undeveloped peoples which, for want of a better term, 
I call prelogical, does not partake of that nature. It is not 
antilogical; it is not alogical either. By designating it 
“ prelogical’’ I merely wish to state that it does not bind 
itself down, as our thought does, to avoiding contradiction. 
It obeys the law of participation first and foremost. Thus 
oriented, it does not expressly delight in what is contradictory 
(which would make it merely absurd in our eyes), but neither 
does it take pains to avoid it. It is often wholly indifferent 
to it, and that makes it so hard to follow. 

As has been said, these characteristics apply only to the 
collective representations and their connections. Considered 
as an individual, the primitive, in so far as he thinks and 
acts independently of these collective representations where 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 79 


possible, will usually feel, argue and act as we should expect 
him to do. The inferences he draws will be just those which 
would seem reasonable to us in like circumstances. If he 
has brought down two birds, for instance, and only picks 
up one, he will ask himself what has become of the other, 
and will look for it. If rain overtakes and inconveniences 
. him, he will seek shelter. If he encounters a wild beast, 
he will strive his utmost to escape, and so forth. But though 
on occasions of this sort primitives may reason as we do, though 
they follow a course similar to the one we should take (which 
in the more simple cases, the most intelligent among the animals 
would also do), it does not follow that their mental activity 
is always subject to the same laws as ours. In fact, as far 
as it is collective, it has laws which are peculiar to itself, and 
the first and most universal of these is the law of participation. 

The very material upon which this mental activity is 
exercised has already undergone the influence of the law of 
participation, for we must realize that their collective represen- 
tations are very different from our concepts. The latter, the 
material with which our logical thought works, are themselves 
the result, as we know, of previous operations of a similar 
kind. The mere expression of a general abstract term, such 
as man, animal, organism, virtually connotes a number of 
separate judgments which involve definite relations between 
many concepts. But the collective representations of primi- 
tives are not, like our concepts, the result of intellectual pro- 
cesses properly so called. They contain, as integral parts, 
affective and motor elements, and above all they imply, in 
the place of our conceptual inclusions or exclusions, parti- 
cipations which are more or less clearly defined, but, as a 
general rule, very vividly sensed. 

Why, for example, should a picture or portrait be to the 
primitive mind something quite different from what it is to 
ours? Whence comes that attributing of mystic properties 
to it, of which we have just had an instance? Evidently 
from the fact that every picture, every reproduction “ parti- 
cipates’’ in the nature, properties, life of that of which it 
is the image. This participation is not to be understood as 
a share—as if the portrait, for example, involved a fraction 
of the whole of the properties or the life which the model 


80 HOW NATIVES THINK 

possesses. Primitive mentality sees no difficulty in the belief 
that such life and properties exist in the original and in its 
reproduction af one and the same time. By virtue of the 
mystic bond between them, a bond represented by the law 
of participation, the reproduction is the original, as the Bororo 
are the araras. Therefore one may obtain from the one what 
one gets from the other; one may influence the second by 
influencing the first. For this reason, if the Mandan chiefs 
let Catlin take their portrait, they will not sleep quiet in 
their graves. Why is this? Because, by virtue of an inevit- 
able participation, anything that happens to their pictures, 
delivered over to strange hands, will be felt by them after 
their death. And why is the tribe so uneasy at the idea that 
the repose of their chiefs should be thus disturbed ? Evidently 
—though Catlin does not tell us so—it is because the welfare 
of the tribe, its prosperity, its very existence depend, by 
virtue of this same participation, upon the condition of its 
chiefs, whether living or dead. 

The same argument applies to the other collective repre- 
sentations, the mystic character of which we have already 
demonstrated: those concerning a man’s name and his 
shadow, for instance. There is one which we should dwell 
on particularly, however, because it serves as a rallying- 
point for the entire theory of primitive mentality. It is 
the representation of the “soul,” the starting-point of the 
doctrine known as animism, the principles of which Tylor 
formulates thus: ‘‘It seems as though thinking men, as 
yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two 
groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it 
that makes the difference between the living body and the dead 
one? What causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death ? 
In the second place, what are those human shapes which 
appear in dreams and visions ? Looking at these two groups 
of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably made 
their first step to the obvious inference that every man has 
two things belonging to him, namely, his life and his phantom. 
These two are evidently in close connection with the body, 
the life as enabling him to feel and think and act, the phantom 
as being his image or second self ; both, also, are perceived 
to be things separable from the body, the life as able to go 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 81 


away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom as appear- 
ing to people at a distance from it, The second step... 
merely the combining the life and the phantom. As both 
belong to the body, why should they not also belong to one 
another, and be manifestations of one and the same soul ? 
. . . This, at any rate, corresponds with: the actual conception 
of the personal soul or spirit among the lower races, which 
may be defined as follows: a thin unsubstantial human 
image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film or shadow; the 
cause of life and thought in the individual it animates, in- 
dependently possessing the personal conscience and volition 
of its corporal owner, past or present; capable of leaving 
the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; 
mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical 
power, and especially the appearing to men, waking or asleep, 
as a phantasm separate from the body to which it bears a 
likeness ; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death 
of that body ; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies 
of other men, animals, and even of things. ... These are 
doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain 
evidence of men’s senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent 
and rational primitive philosophy.” 1 

It is indeed a favourite idea of Tylor’s that animism is 
a doctrine which is all the more consistent and satisfactory 
from the logical standpoint, the nearer to its source that we can 
view it, that is, in its most primitive form. Later, when 
complicated by new elements and endeavouring to resolve 
more subtle problems and to generalize, it becomes obscure 
and entangled. At its source, its clarity is absolute because 
it imposes itself, so to speak, on the naive reflection of the 
‘‘savage philosopher’? when faced by the facts. And the 
satisfaction which this philosopher would find in his hypo- 
thesis is savoured by the savant of to-day in his turn, when 
he affirms that this hypothesis is the spontaneous and universal 
product of an intellectual activity which is always identical 
at bottom, and which, like his own, is impelled by the rational 
need for supplying an answer to the problems which the facts 
propound to the intelligence. 

It is a very seductive theory, and it seems as if, were we 

1 Primitive Culture, i. ee 428-9 (4th edit., 1903). 


| 
| 


\ 
} 


82 HOW NATIVES THINK | 


in the place of the ‘‘ savage philosopher,” we should reason as 
he does—that is, as we make him reason. But have such 
“savage philosophers” ever existed? Do the collective 
representations of the soul in the lower races constitute a sort 
of doctrine born of the necessity for resolving biological 
problems ? Nothingseems more unlikely. Nothing seems more 
improbable even, if it be certain that the mentality of such 
races is oriented differently from our own, and that their ~ 
collective representations are, above all, mystical by nature, 
primitives being much more concerned about the mystic 
virtues inherent in things than about the logical coherence 
of their own thought. That is why, the more rational and 
consecutive this primitive “‘ philosophy ’’ of the soul becomes, 
the more reason will there be to fear that, in spite of the 
amount of evidence collected and the skill of those who inter- 
pret it, it will still be very far removed from that which it 
pretends to explain. 

As a matter of fact, in almost every case where there has 
been an adequately prolonged and careful investigation, we 
must abandon the happy simplicity of ‘one and the same 
soul ’’ manifesting itself as ‘‘life on the one side and phantom 
on the other.” The collective representations offer something 
much more complex and far less easy to ‘‘ explain.” 

To take a few examples from the West Coast of Africa, 
Ellis has found a number of collective representations which 
do not tally in any way (as he himself expressly states) with 
the idea of a soul such as Tylor has defined, quoted above, 
The natives, says Ellis, distinguish the Ara from the srahman. 
“The kra existed before the birth of the man, probably 
as the kra of a long series of men, and after his death it will 
equally continue its independent career, either by entering a 
newborn human body, or that of an animal, or by wandering 
about the world as a sisa or kra without a tenement. The 
general idea is that the sisa always seeks to return to a human 
body and again become a kra, even taking advantage of the 
temporary absence of a kra from its tenement to take its place. 
... The kra can quit the body it inhabits at will, and return 
to it again. Usually it only quits it during sleep, and the 
occurrences dreamed of are believed to be the adventures of 
the kra during its absence. The srahman or ghost-man only 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 83 


commences its career when the corporeal man dies, and it 
simply continues in the Dead-land, the existence the cor- 
poral man formerly led in the world. Thus we must consider 
“separately (1) the man; (2) the indwelling spirit or kra; 
(3) the ghost or srahman, though in another form the last is 
only the continuation of the first in shadowy form.” 

This differentiation is applied in every case. ‘‘ When the 
bush is torn up and withers, the kra (so to speak) of the bush 
enters a seedling bush, or a seed, and the ghost-bush goes to 
Dead-land. Similarly, the kra (so to speak) of the sheep, 
when that sheep is killed, enters a newborn lamb, and the 
ghost-sheep goes to Dead-land for the use of ghost-men. 
.. . Dead-land itself, its mountains, forests, and rivers are, 
the Tshi-speaking negro holds, the ghosts of similar natural 
features which formerly existed in the world.” | 

The kra, therefore, is not the soul. ‘‘ The soul, in the 
accepted sense of the word, is the ‘animating, separable, 
surviving entity,’ the ‘ vehicle of individual personal exist- 
ence’ (Tylor), whereas every kra has been the indwelling 
spirit of many men, and probably will be of many more. 
The kra in some respects resembles a guardian spirit, but it 
is more than that. Its close connection with the man is indi- 
cated by the fact of its nocturnal adventures during its absence 
from the body being remembered by that man when he awakes. 
The latter even feels physically the effect of his kva’s actions, 
and when a negro awakes feeling stiff and unrefreshed, or 
with limbs aching from muscular rheumatism, he invariably 
attributes these symptoms to the fact of his kra having been 
engaged in some struggle with another, or in some severe 
toil. . . . It has, though doubtless in a shadowy form, the 
very shape and appearance of the man, and both the mind 
and the body of the latter are affected by, and register the 
results of, the kva’s actions.” 

“When the kra leaves the body of the man it inhabits, 
that man suffers no physical inconvenience; it goes out, 
when he is asleep, without his knowledge, and if it should 
leave him when he is awake, he is only made aware of its 
departure by a sneeze or a yawn. When, however, the soul, 
‘ the vehicle of personal individual existence,’ leaves the body, 
that body falls into a condition of suspended. animation ; 


84 HOW NATIVES THINK 


it is cold, pulseless, and apparently lifeless. Sometimes, 
though rarely, the soul returns after such an absence, and 
then the man has been in a swoon or trance; more generally 
it does not return ; then the man is dead.”’ ! 

How therefore are we to regard the relations of a man with 
his kra which certainly, as Ellis tells us, is not his soul? It 
is equally incorrect to say that his kra is himself and that he 
is not himself. It is not the individual, for it existed before 
him and survives him; it is nevertheless not himself, for 
upon awaking the individual remembers what the kra has 
done, endured, and suffered during the night. If we persist 
in submitting these representations to the claims of logical. 
thought, we shall not only not discover in them the “ consistent 
and rational philosophy ” which Tylor and his school expect, 
but they will remain unintelligible. On the other hand, we 
shall understand them to the extent to which they may be 
‘ wnderstood,” if we refer them to the general law of partici- 
pation. The individual, while living, participates in the kra 
that inhabits him, that is, he to a certain extent is this ka, 
and at the same time he is not: for the actual contradiction 
does not disturb his prelogical mentality. At the moment 
of death, this participation comes to an end.? 

Representations which are just as involved are to be found 
in most undeveloped aggregates. Since they did not suggest 
any meaning which investigators could accept (judging them 
as they did by the rules of logical thought) these writers 
frequently tried to guard against absurdity by supposing 
that primitives: admitted of several souls. It thus became 
possible to distribute among these that which would have 
been irreconcilable and incompatible in a single one. Spencer 
and Gillen, for instance, refer frequently to multiple souls 
in dealing with the tribes of Central Australians.3 Among 
the natives of the Torres Straits, Haddon speaks of parts of 


5 A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, pp. 15-21, 106. Cf. The Tshi- 
speaking Peoples, p. 149. 

2 Traces of representations of this kind were found among the Greeks 
who, according to Rohde (Psyche, i. pp. 4, 6, 257; ii. pp. 141, 157, 183-4, 
304-5), distinguished between a vital principle, a soul or shade in Hades 
after death, and another principle, which inhabited the body during life, 
but which neither disease nor death could affect. 

3 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 515; The Northern Tribes 
of Central Australia, p. 450. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 85 


the soul. “There was a belief that part of the mar: left 
at death, and part remained until frightened away.” In 
North America, a plurality of souls seems to be the rule. 
‘They distinguish four souls in the same body. An old man 
told us sometime ago that some natives had two or three souls, 
and that his own had left him more than two years before, to go 
away with his dead parents, and that he now only possessed 
the soul of his body, which would go down to the grave with 
him. By this we know that they imagine that the body has 
a soul of its own, which some call the soul of their nation (?) 
and that besides there are others which leave it sooner or later 
according to their fancy.” 2 ‘It is believed by some of the 
Hidatsa that every human being has four souls in one. They 
account for the phenomenon of gradual death where the 
extremities are apparently dead while consciousness remains, 
by supposing the four souls to depart, one after another, at 
different times. When dissolution is complete, they say that 
all the souls are gone, and have joined together again outside 
of the body.” 3—‘‘ The Mandan believe that each person has 
several spirits dwelling within him; one of which is black, 
another brown, and a third light-coloured, the last alone 
returning to the Lord of Life.”’s The Dacotans recognize 
four: ‘ (1) a spirit of the body, which dies with the body ; 
(2) a spirit which always remains with or near the body ; 
(3) the soul which accounts for the deeds of the body and 
is supposed by some to go south or by others west. The 
fourth always lingers with the small bundle of the hair of the 
deceased, kept by the relatives until they have a chance to 
throw it into the enemy’s country, when it becomes a roving 
spirit, bringing disease and death.” 5 Some Sioux even admit 
of five souls. In British Columbia, ‘‘ man is believed to have 
four souls. The main soul is said to have the shape of a 
mannikin, the others are the shadows of the first. In disease 
either the lesser souls or the main one leave the body. Shamans 
can easily return the shadows, but not the main soul. If the 
latter leaves the body the sick one must die. After death 
the main soul goes to the sunset, and here it remains. The 


1 ** The Western Tribes of Torres Straits,” J.AJ., xix. p. 317. 
> Relations du Père Lejeune, p. 146 (1630). 

3 Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,” E. B. Rept., xi. p. 517. , 

4 Ibid., p. 512. s Lynd, cited by Dorsey, ibid., p. 484. 


86 HOW NATIVES THINK 


shadows become ghosts. They revisit the places which the 
deceased frequented during lifetime, and continue to do 
the same actions which he did when alive.” 1 

These reports, to which we might add many others, are 
far from being unanimous regarding the functions of the various 
souls. Nevertheless they all attest a multiplicity of souls in 
the same individual, and diversity in the functions of these 
souls. They indicate, too, though less regularly and clearly, 
that the fate of these souls is not the same after death. Is it 
not permissible to imagine that this multiplicity is pre-emi- 
nently expressive of the impossibility which the investigators 
found in reconciling what the ‘‘ savages ”’ had told them, with 
their own preconceived ideas upon the soul ? Gross misunder- 
standing and misconstruction were inevitable. The mission- 
aries and explorers were making use of terms (soul, spirit, 
ghost, etc.) defined for them by prolonged evolution in religion, 
philosophy, and literature, and they found themselves dealing 
with collective representations which were essentially mystic 
and prelogical, not yet reduced to a conceptual form, and 
paying very little regard to logical laws. Consequently 
nearly all they report needs to be revised and corrected, As 
a general rule, an observer’s report is the more suspect, the 
more readily it agrees with the current conception of the soul. 
On the other hand, observations frequently manifest a charac- 
teristic obscurity, or even present an inextricable confusion, 
which is a faithful reflection of the perplexity felt by their 
authors. | 

I shall quote but two instances. “It is difficult to say 
precisely what the Fijians believe to be the essence of the 
immortal part of a man. The word ‘ yalo’ has the following 
meanings. Yalo (with pronoun-suffixed) means Mind, as 
Yalo-ngu. Yalo (with possessive pronoun separated) means 
Shade or Spirit. Yaloyalo means Shadow. From the posses- 
sive pronoun being suffixed we may gather that the mind was 
regarded as being as intimately connected with a man’s body 
as his arm, but that the spirit could be detached from it.” 2 
Among the Yakuts, “the elementary soul of the object in 


t F. Boas, ‘‘ The North-western Tribes of Canada,” Reports of the British 
Association, p. 461 (1894). 

2 B. A. Thompson, ‘ The Ancestor Gods of the Fijians,” /J.A.J., xxiv. 
p. 354 (note). 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 87 


general (ichchi) which, it appears, merely expresses the fact of 
existence, differs from the soul of living things (sur). Life 
begins when respiration begins (fy). Living objects have a 
double soul therefore—ichchi and sur ; animals when dead or 
even ill lose their sur and preserve their ichchi alone, and in 
the case of death this disappears also. Men, and among 
animals, horses alone, have a triple soul: ichchi, sur, and the 
‘but. The human kut is small, no larger than a little piece of 
coal. Sometimes the shaman summons from beneath the 
earth, in the left or female part of the house, the kut of those 
who are sick. . . . The kut sometimes abandons man during 
his sleep, and wanders afar. If some misfortune befalls it 
during its travels, its owner falls ill. The kui is like a faint 
picture, like the shadow. As the shadow has three parts, 
one large and faint, one small and darker, and the centre 
quite black, so man has three souls. When he loses one, he 
suffers from a feeling of uneasiness; when he loses two, he 
becomes ill: and when he loses all three, he dies.”’! The 
confusion in this report and the evident impossibility of recon- 
ciling the different parts with the definitions given are very 
significant: they may however help us to understand what 
this pretended plurality of souls really amounts to. 

It is noteworthy that without thinking of a prelogical 
and mystic mentality, without even having made any research 
into the problem which occupies my mind, Pechuél-Loesche 
should have arrived at the same conclusion, touching the 
plurality of souls, as I do. ‘If we were generalizing hastily,” 
he says in conclusion, ‘‘ we might speak of a belief in two 
souls, or even in three or four. The first would be power 
(Potenz) the creative principle (the essence of the ancestors 
passing to their descendants), possibly also part of the uni- 
versal soul. Then there would be the personal or indi- 
vidual soul; finally the dream-soul, and the wandering or 
desert-soul (Wildnisseele). But such a conception would be 
incorrect.”2 In my opinion, these various souls express 
‘ participations,” irreducible to logical intelligibility, but the 
most natural thing in the world to prelogical mentality. We 


1 Sieroshewiski, Douze Ans chez les Yakoutes, cited -J.A.I., xxxi. p. 108 
(note). 
2 Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, pp. 296-300. 


88 HOW NATIVES THINK 


can find sufficient evidence upon the subject of the desert-soul, 
which is what Miss Kingsley calls the ‘‘ bush-soul.” 

The negroes of Calabar, she says, suppose there to be 
four souls: ‘‘ (a) the soul that survives death, (6) the shadow 
on the path, (c) the dream-soul, and (d) the bush-soul. This 
bush-soul is always in the form of an animal in the forest— 
never of a plant. Sometimes when a man sickens it is because 
his bush-soul is angry at being neglected, and a witch-doctor 
is called in, who, having diagnosed this as being cause of the 
complaint, advises the administration of some kind of offering 
to the offended one. . . . The bush-souls of a family are 
usually the same for a man and his sons, for a mother and 
her daughters... . Sometimes all the children take the 
mother’s, sometimes all take the father’s... .” 1 “This 
bush-soul may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a 
leopard, and ... no layman can see his own soul. It 
is not as if it were even connected with all earth pigs or all 
leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular 
earth pig or leopard or other animal. . . . If his bush-soul ~ 
dies, the man it is connected with dies. Therefore if the 
hunter who has killed it can be found out—a thing a witch- 
doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance to have had 
his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the catas- 
trophe; . . . that hunter has to pay compensation to the 
family of the deceased. On the other hand, if the man belong- 
ing to the bush-soul dies, the bush-soul animal has to die 
too.””2 Miss Kingsley has collected very detailed information 
about the diseases of this bush-soul, as well as those of the 
dream-soul, and of the treatment that such diseases require. 

There was an exactly similar idea existing in Central 
America. Of the Guatemaltecs Gage tells the following 
quaint story: ‘Many are deluded by the Devil to believe 
that their life dependeth upon the life of such and such a 
beast (which they take unto them as their familiar spirit) 
and think that when that beast dieth they must die; when he 
is chased, their hearts pant; when he is faint, they are 
faint ...’’3 This evidently refers to a forest-soul, 


1 Travels in West Africa, pp. 459-60. 

2 West African Studies, pp. 209-10. 

3 Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, iii. 
P. 120. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 89 


We accordingly find nothing among primitives which 
exactly corresponds with the single soul which, according 
to Tylor, can manifest itself in the double form of vital 
principle and of phantom. Undoubtedly they everywhere 
believe in the objective reality of what they see in dreams, 
and everywhere, too, they are convinced that the ghosts of 
the dead return, at least for some time, to haunt the places 
in which they dwelt while living. But what we have just 
learnt about this proves indeed that their collective representa- 
tions on this matter do not proceed from any need to account 
for these apparitions by a uniform concept of the “soul.” 
On the contrary, I should say that originally (to the extent 
that such a term is permissible) the idea of a soul is not found 
among primitives. That which takes its place is the repre- 
sentation, usually a very emotional one, of one or more co- 
existent and intertwined participations, as yet not merged 
into the distinct consciousness of an individuality which is 
really one. The member of a tribe, totem, or clan, feels himself 
mystically united with the animal or vegetable species which 
is his totem, mystically united with his dream-soul, his forest- 
soul, and so on. 

These communions, the intensity of which is renewed and 
increased at certain times (the sacred ceremonies, rites of ini- 
tiation, and so forth), by no means exclude each other. They 
have no need to be expressed in definite terms to be profoundly 
felt, and felt by every member of the group. Later, when 
these rites and ceremonies have gradually ceased to be under- 
stood, and then to be practised, such participations retained 
in customs and myths will fall, so to speak, into the form 
of “‘ multiple souls,” as has happened in the case of the Calabar 
negroes, so carefully studied by Miss Kingsley. And later 
still, nearer our own times, as the example of the Greeks 
show, these multiple souls will in their turn be crystallized 
into a single soul, not without the distinction between the 
vital principle and the spiritual inhabitant of the body still 
remaining apparent. In short, the “ soul ” properly so called, 
which serves as the starting-point, of Tylor’s theory, and 
which is, according to him, the object of the savage’s primitive 
philosophy, does not appear, according to my view of the 
matter, except in peoples of a relatively advanced type. If 


— 


90 HOW NATIVES THINK 


he has referred it so far back it is not because he did not know 
the facts, for Tylor himself quotes a number of cases in which 
the multiplicity of “souls’’ is expressly mentioned. But 
his interpretation of these facts was, as it were, imposed upon 
him by his postulate, according to which the mentality of lower 
races obeys the same logical laws as our own thought. Let 
us abandon this postulate, and at once the mystical and pre- 
logical nature of this mentality appears, and with it the law 
of participation which governs its collective representations. 
From this it follows too that the concept of the soul can no 
longer be considered save as the product of thought which 
is already somewhat advanced, and not yet known to primitive 
peoples. 


III 


It scarcely ever happens that the primitive mind acquires 
its collective representations in an isolated state, apart from 
the connections with which they are usually bound up. The 
mystic character which attaches to them necessarily involves 
relations, which are also mystic, between the various objects 
of their thought. We may then admit a priori, as it were, 
that the same law of participation which | governs the forma- 
existing between them. To establish this position, it will be 
necessary to study the method in which the main inter- 
relations between persons and things is actually occur in the 
prelogical mind. r 

In the first place, the very existence of the social groups, 
in its relations with that of the individuals which compose 
them, is most frequently represented (and felt at the same 
time) as a participation, a communion, or rather, a number 
of participations and communions. This characteristic is 
apparent in all the primitive societies about which we have 
fairly detailed and reliable information. It has been fully 
demonstrated in the two volumes on the tribes of Central 
Australia by Spencer and Gillen, Among the Aruntas ‘each 
individual is the direct incarnation of an Alcheringa ancestor 
or of the spirit part of some ae animal. The 
totem of any man is regarded . . . as the same thing : as him- 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION OI 


self. . . . Each totemic group is supposed to have a direct 
control over the numbers of the animal or plant the name 
of which he bears. . . .”’1 Lastly, each totem is mystically 
bound to a strictly defined locality or portion in space which is 
always occupied by the spirits of the totemic ancestors, and 
this is called ‘‘ local relationship.” 2 

The collective representation in this caseis exactly like that 
which so astonished Von den Steinen when the Bororos 
“ rigidly ’”? maintained that they were araras, and the Trumai 
that they were aquatic animals. Every individual is both 
such and such a man or woman, alive at present, a certain 
ancestral individual, who may be human or semi-human, who 
lived in the fabulous age of the Alcheringa, and at the same 
time he is his totem, that is, he partakes in mystic fashion 
of the essence of the animal or vegetable species whose name 
he bears. The verb ‘‘ to be”’ (which moreover is non-existent 
in most of the languages of undeveloped peoples) has not here 
the ordinary copulative sense it bears in our languages. It 
signifies something different, and something more. It en- 
compasses both the collective representation and the collective 
consciousness in a participation that is actually lived, in a 
kind of symbiosis effected by identity of essence. This is 
the reason that the members of a definite totemic group 
alone have the power to carry out the infichiuma ceremonies, 
the aim of which is to secure a regular reproduction of a certain 
animal or plant species.3 This explains, too, the performances, 
ceremonies, dances (with or without masks, painted decora- 
tions, costumes, tattooings) which are to be met with in many 
primitive peoples, and which are designed to attain the same 
end—the bison dances of the North American Indians, stag 
dances of the Huichol Mexicans, the serpent dances of the 
Zuñis and in other pueblos, for instance. 

With the Australian tribes, we may say that Spencer and 
Gillen have put a finger on the very spot, not only revealing 
the mystic and at the same time utilitarian significance of the 
intichiuma ceremonies, but the intimate relation which exists 
between the individual, his totemic group and his totemic 
species, a relation which cannot be expressed by a concept, 


t The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 202-4. 
+ Ibid., pp. 303, 544. 3 Ibid., pp. 169-70 


02 HOW NATIVES THINK 


just because the wholly mystic relation consists of a participa- 
tion which cannot be comprised within the limits of logical 
thought. ‘At the first glance it looks much as if all that 
they intended to represent was the behaviour of certain 
animals, but the ceremonies have a much deeper meaning, 
for each performer represents an ancestral individual who 
lived in the Alcheringa. . . . It is as a reincarnation of the 
never-dying spirit part of one of their semi-animal ancestors 
that every member of the tribe is born, and therefore, when 
born he, or she, bears of necessity the name of the animal or 
plant to which the Alcheringa ancestor was a transformation 
or a descendant.’’! The ceremonies and dances, therefore, 
are intended to revive and maintain, by means of the nervous 
exaltation and ecstasy of movement not wholly unlike that 
seen in more advanced societies, the community of essence 
in which the actual individual, the ancestral being living 
again in him, and the animal or plant species that forms his 
totem, are all mingled. To our minds, there are necessarily 
three distinct realities here, however close the relationship 
may be. To the primitive minds, the three make but one, yet at 
the same time are three. 

In this way the influence which the ceremonies exercise 
over the totemic species is more than direct : it is 2mmanent. 
How can the primitive doubt their effective power? The 
most invincible logical certitude gives way before the sym- 
biotic feeling which is an accompaniment of collective repre- 
sentations thus lived and translated into action. 

Another aspect of this participation or rather communion 
is revealed by the part played in the life of the individual 
and of the community among the Aruntas, by the sacred 
objects ts known as churinga. _ These things (pieces of wood or 
stone of an oblong shape, and generally decorated with mystic 
designs) are most carefully preserved and deposited in a sacred 
place which women and children dare not approach. Every 
totemic group has its own, and from the standpoint of logical 
thought it would be very difficult to define exactly what 
churinga are, or are not. The external souls of individuals ; 
the vehicles of ancestral spirits and possibly the bodies of 
these ancestors themselves; extracts of totemic essence; 


1 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 228. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 93 


reservoirs of vitality—-they are all of these in turn and simul- 
taneously. The recognition of their mystic power attains 
its highest intensity at the moment of the initiation cere- 
monies, which we shall examine in detail later.t At this stage, 
however, I may note, on Spencer and Gillen’s authority, the 
deep religious respect which surrounds the churinga, the care 
taken to preserve them, and the veneration and precaution 
with which they are handled. ‘During the whole time the 
presence of the churinga’’ (which had been lent to a neigh- 
bouring tribe, and were being examined on their return) 
“seems to produce a reverent silence as if the natives really 
believed that the spirits of the dead men to whom they have 
belonged in times past were present, and no one, while they 
were being examined, ever spoke in tones louder than a 
whisper.’ 2? Everywhere, the very expressions used by investi- 
gators suggest the idea of participation. “ A man who possesses 
such a churinga as the churinga snake one will constantly 
rub it with his hand, singing as he does so about the Alcheringa 
history of the snake, and gradually comes to feel that there 
is some special association between him and the sacred object 
—that a virtue of some kind passes from it to him and also 
from him to it.’’3 Can we be surprised, therefore, that the 
churinga is represented, or rather, felt, to be a living being ? 
It is something very different from a piece of wood or stone. 
It is intimately connected with the ancestor ; it has emotions 
as we have, and these can be calmed when it is stroked with 
the hand, in the same way in which those of living people may 
be soothed. 

From a participation which is directly represented and 
actually felt, such as described by Von den Steinen and by 
Spencer and Gillen, it is an easy transition to the belief, which 
is so common in undeveloped races, in a relationship between 
men and animals, or rather, between certain groups of men 
and certain predetermined animals. Such beliefs are often 
expressed in myths. Among the Aruntas, Spencer and Gillen 
collected a number of legends relating to semi-human or semi- 
animal beings, which establish a living transition between 


t Vide Chap. VIII. pp. 354-8. 

2 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 303. 

3 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 277-8. 
4 Ibid., p. 265 (note). 


94 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the two classes. Very frequently, too, the expressions used 
by the observers are significant. Thus, in describing a totemic 
ceremony, it is said: “‘ The particular rat-man or man-rat— 
for, as already said, the identity of the human individual is 
sunk in that of the object with which he is associated, and 
from which he is supposed to have originated—to whom this 
ceremony referred, is supposed to have travelled to Walyirra, 
where he died, and where his spirit remained associated as 
usual with the churinga.’’* Spencer and Gillen find in these 
mythical ideas “a crude attempt to describe the origin of 
human beings out of non-human creatures who were of various 
forms ; some of them were representations of animals, others 
of plants, but in all cases they were to be regarded as inter- 
mediate stages in the transition of an animal or plant ancestor 
into the human individual who bears its name as that of his 
or her totem.” 2 

Among the peoples who are more advanced in develop- 
ment, the idea of these mythical animals is slightly different. 
The ancestors of the totemic group are not exactly like 
animals that exist to-day, but they have a mystic share of 
both the animal and the human nature. The primitives 
project upon them, as it were, the participation which 
forms the union between the social group and its totemic 
animal. In British Columbia, for instance, “‘I sought to 
learn from him (i.e. the usual informant) whether his people 
were known as the otter-people, and whether they looked 
upon the otter as their relatives, and paid regard to these 
animals by not killing or hunting them. He smiled at the 
question and shook his head, and later explained that although 
they believed their remote ancestor to have been an otter, they 
did not think it was the same kind of otter as lived now. The 
otters from which they were descended were otter-people, 
not animals, who had the power to change from the forms 
of men and women to those of the otter. All the animals 
in the old-time were like that, they were not just common 
animals and nothing else ; they were people as well and could 
take the human or the animal form at will, by putting on or 
taking off the skin or other natural clothing of the animal. . .. 
Among the Thompsons they have a distinct term in their 

t The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 231. 2 Ibid., p. 392. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 95 


language by which these mystic beings are distinguished from 
ordinary animals.” 1 
Here again mystic participations account for relationships 
that the lower races consider as natural and evident, however 
absurd and unimaginable they appear to European investi- 
gators. Du Chaillu tells us that the African “‘ king Quengueza 
refused to eat the meat offered him. ‘It is roondah for me.’ 
He explained that the meat of the Bos brachicheros was for- 
bidden to his family, and was an abomination to them, for 
the reason that many generations ago one of their women 
gave birth to a calf instead of a child. I laughed, but the 
king replied very soberly that he could show me a woman of 
another family whose grandmother had given birth to a 
crocodile, for which reason the crocodile was roondah to that 
family. . . . They are religiously scrupulous on this matter 
. scarce a man is to be found to whom some article of 
food is not roondah,”’2 There is no need to lay stress on 
such beliefs, for they are excessively general, and experience, 
in the rare cases in which it can be appealed to, proves power- 
less against them Rajah Brooke tells of a man who had 
had his leg mutilated by an alligator, despite his mystic re- 
lationship with that animal. ‘I asked him if he had since 
retaliated on the alligator tribe. He replied, ‘No; I never 
wish to kill an alligator, as the dreams of my forefathers 
have always forbidden such acts; and I can’t tell why an 
alligator should have attacked me, unless he mistook me for a 
stranger, and that was the reason the spirits saved my life.’ ’’ 3 
When a social group or an individual thus considers itself 
solidary with, or related to, a totemic animal, when he or it 
objectifies this participation in the actual relations with the 
animal, does it signify the animal species considered in its 
entirety and, so to speak, in an abstract fashion, or all the 
members of the species considered collectively, or is it a certain 
animal in particular ? This question presents logical thought 
with hypotheses which are distinct and mutually exclusive, 
and we have to choose between them. Prelogical mentality, 
however, hardly ever separates them (except in the case of the 


3 Hill Tout, ‘‘ The Halkomelem of British Columbia,” J.A.I., xxiv. p. 325. 
2 Equatorial Africa, pp. 308-9; J.A.J., xxiv. p. 325. 
3 Ten Years in Sarawak, i. p. 235. 


96 HOW NATIVES THINK 


“ forest-soul ”” given above) just because the law of participa- 
tion, which mainly governs them, allows of his thinking of 
the individual in the collective and the collective in the indi- 
vidual without any difficulty. Between the bear and bears, 
. and the bison and bisons, and one fish and fish in general, 
. such a mentality pictures a mystic participation, and neither 
the species as a whole nor the individual existence of its repre- 
sentatives means the same to him as it would do to us. 

Are the honours so frequently paid in ceremonious style 
to an animal killed in the chase, meant for that animal in 
particular, or for the spirit of the genus whose goodwill must 
be secured? There is no alternative in the case: such 
honours are paid to both, as one and indivisible. ‘ A French- 
man having one day thrown away a mouse which he had 
just caught, a little girl picked it up, intending to eat it. The 
child’s father snatched it from her and began to caress the 
dead animal affectionately. . . . ‘I am doing this,’ he said, 
‘so that the spirit of the mouse may not trouble my child 
when she has eaten it.’’?! This guardian spirit, interpreted : 
as a concept for rational thought, is a relation which in reality 
can find no expression in its categories: it is the interpretation 
of a participating relation between the individual animal 
and the collective. And this participation does not find its 
reason and its proof, as it seems to us, in the identity of 
anatomical structure or physiological function, of external 
characteristics which are apparent and can be verified by 
experience: it is conceived and felt “in terms of spirit” 
like every reality which the prelogical mind perceives. To 
such a mind that which is of supreme interest in the animal 
(setting aside the need of obtaining food from it; and even 
eating the flesh of an animal is above all participating mys- 
tically in its nature), is not its visible form or qualities ; it 
is the spirit of which it is the manifestation, upon which the 
mystic relations of this animal (whether regarded individually 
or collectively, matters little), with the human groups in 
question depend. Invisible and intangible, this “ spirit ” 
is at once in each and all. Such “ multipresence ” proves 
no stumbling-block to prelogical mentality. 


t Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, iii. 
Pp. 299-300. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 97 


Bancroft relates a Californian belief, which seems incredible 
to him, and which throws strong light upon the mystic par- 
ticipation between the individual and the species. “They 
called this bird (the buzzard) the panes, and once every year 
they had a festival of the same name, in which the principal 
ceremony was the killing of a buzzard without losing a drop 
of its blood. It was next skinned, all possible care being 
taken to preserve the feathers entire. . . . Last of all the 
body was buried within the sacred enclosure amid great 
apparent grief from the old women, they mourning as over 
the loss of relative or friend. Tradition explained this: 
the panes had indeed been once a woman, whom, wandering 
in the mountain ways, the great god Chinigchinich had come 
suddenly upon and changed into a bird. How this was con- 
nected with the killing of her every year anew by the people 
and with certain extraordinary ideas held relative to that 
killing is, however, by no means clear; for it was believed 
that as often as the bird was killed it was made alive again, 
and more, and—faith to move mountains—that the birds 
killed in one same yearly feast in many separate villages were 
one and the same bird !’’! 


IV 


So far we have been considering especially, as far as the 
collective representations of primitives are concerned, what 
we might call the participating relations from the static point 
of view, that is, those which govern the existence of objects, 
natural phenomena, individuals or species. Let us now pass 
to the dynamic aspect, and consider the influence and sway 
which beings and objects mutually exercise. To tell the truth, 
it is one of the characteristic features of primitive mentality 
that in very many cases the difference between the two points 
of view tends to disappear. It is often impossible to decide 
whether an influence is transitive or immanent, and in spite 
of the difficulty which we feel in conceiving that which we 
consider contradictory, it is both at the same time. This 
is the case with the influence exercised by the totemic group 
upon the animal or plant which is its totem, by means of the 

t The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, iii, p. 108. 

ff 


98 HOW NATIVES THINK 


intichiuma ceremonies. In North America, again, the members 
of the wind totem are supposed to have a special influence on 
blizzards, and they are entreated to send a breeze when the 
mosquitoes become too troublesome.! In the Torres Straits, 
‘an Umai man (having the dog as his totem) was credited 
with understanding the habits of dogs, and with ability to 
exercise special control over them.” 2 Among the tribes of 
Central Australia ‘an euro man gives to a plum-tree man a 
‘sung-over ’ churinga for the purpose of assisting him to hunt 
the animal.’’3 In the Kaitish tribe, the headman of the 
water totem must religiously refrain from using a pointing 
stick or bone against an enemy, for if he did so, the water 
would become foul and infectious.4 

These facts and many others which re be cited serve 
to show how insensibly prelogical mentality establishes a 
connection between the influence exercised_ upon. oneself 
and the influence exercised on something else, When a certain 
act of the water totem chief makes the water undrinkable, 
it is impossible to decide whether the influence exercised is 
imagined as transient or as immanent: prelogical mentality 
does not differentiate. But that which we perceive clearly 
in the relations of the totemic groups with the being or object 
or species which is their totem, fa profound and informed 
analysis of prelogical mentality would discover among an 
infinitude of other relations, which this same mentality would 
also picture as subject to the law of participation, Thus 
there exists a mystic participation between each totemic 
group and a certain spot which pertains to it, that is, between 
this totemic group and a certain point of the compass. The 
cardinal points, in their turn, are bound up (also by mystic 
participation) with colours, winds, mythical animals, and 
these with rivers, or sacred forests, and so on, almost to 
infinity. The natural environment of a certain group, tribe 
or family of tribes, for instance, thus appears in their collective 
representations, not as an object or a system of objects and 
phenomena governed by fixed laws, according to the laws of 
rational thought—but as an unstable ensemble of mystic 


1 Dorsey, “ _Siouan Cults,’”’ E. B. Rept., xi. p. 410. 

2 Haddon, ‘ The West Tribes of Torres Straits,’ J.4.1., xix. p. 325. 

3 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, PP. 202-4. 
4 Id., The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 463. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 99 


actions and reactions, of which persons, things, phenomena, 
are but the vehicles and manifestations, an ensemble which 
depends upon the group, as the group depends upon it. 
Oriented differently from our own, and pre-eminently 
engaged with mystic qualities and connections, with the law 
of participation as its supreme guide and control, primitive 
mentality perforce interprets in a fashion other than ours 
what we call nature and experience. Everywhere it perceives 
the communication of qualities (through transference, contact, 
projection, contamination, defilement, possession, in short, 
through a number of varied operations) which, either instan- 
taneously or in the course of time, bring a person or a thing 
into participation with a given faculty; and these qualities 
have the power of consecrating him or it, or the contrary, at 
the beginning or end of aceremony.t Later on, from a formal 
point of view, and to demonstrate the actual functioning of 
prelogical mentality, I shall pass in review a certain number 
of magical or religious practices derived from these ideas, 
and they will appear to be inspired and maintained by this 
belief in a participation. The beliefs relating to the different 
kinds of taboo fall under this head. When an Australian 
aboriginal or a Maori, terrified at the idea that he has uncon- 
sciously partaken of a food which is forbidden, dies from 
having infringed his taboo, it is because he feels himself 
hopelessly impregnated by a death-dealing influence which 
has entered his body with the food in question. This same 
influence was imparted to the food through participation : for 
example, it may have been the remains of a chief’s repast 
which an unfortunate man of the common people has eaten 
inadvertently. | 
The same ideas are at the bottom of the universal belief 
which affirms that certain men become animals—tigers, 
wolves, bears, etc.—whenever they put on the skins of such. 
To the primitives, such an idea is wholly mystic. They are 
not concerned with knowing whether the man, in becoming a 
tiger, ceases to be a man, and later, when he becomes a man 
again, isnolongeratiger. That whichis of paramount import- 
ance to them is the mystic virtue which makes these individuals 
‘“ participable,” to use Malebranche’s term, of both tiger 


t Cf. Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges ad’ Histoire des Religions, pp. 22-32, 66-7 


100 HOW NATIVES THINK 


and man in certain conditions, and consequently more for- 
midable than men who are never anything but men, and tigers 
which are always tigers only. 

“ How is this?” said the worthy Dobrizhoffer to the Abi- 
pones, ‘you daily kill tigers in the plain without dread, 
why then should you weakly fear a false imaginary tiger in 
the town?” ‘ You Fathers don’t understand these matters,” 
they reply, with a smile. ‘‘ We never fear, but kill, tigers 
in the plain, because we can see them. Artificial tigers 
we do fear, because they can neither be seen or killed 
by us.” : 

So, too, the Huichol who adorns himself with the éagle's 
feathers does not do so solely, or even mainly, for decoration. 
He believes that he can, by means of these feathers, transfer 
to himself some of the acute visual power, strength, and 
shrewdness of the bird. Again it is participation which 
is the basis of the collective representation that dictates this 
action. 

As a general rule, the processes employed by primitives 
to obtain the results they desire afford enlightenment as to 
their ideas of natural forces, and the manifestation of the 
living beings and phenomena which surround them; for we 
may say that they either imitate the manifestation, such as 
they suppose it to be, or else they imagine it as a symbol of 
what they do themselves. Now these processes, as we shall 
see in detail later on, are essentially mystic, and almost always 
involve the elements of participation. Their idea of the 
forces of ambient nature, then, presents the same character- 
istics. This is a fresh reason for abandoning the plausible 
and seductive, yet incorrect theory according to which, by 
spontaneous and inevitable application of anthropomorphic 
analogy, primitives see everywhere in nature wills, spirits, souls 
like their own. Far from sanctioning our attributing to 
them previous reflection upon their own activity, or a generali- 
zation which is founded on the result of such reflection, the 
facts forbid of our endowing them with that logical and con- 
sistent natural ‘‘ philosophy ”’ which, at any rate in its origin, 
animism would be. 

We must undoubtedly take into account the stupendous 

t Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, ii. pp. 77-8. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION IOI 


number of facts collected and classified by Tylor, Frazer, 
and their collaborators and disciples, and grant that, according 
to these facts, we never find in the collective representations 
of primitives anything that is dead, motionless, without life. 
There is abundance of evidence that all entities and all objects 
even those which are inanimate and inorganic, even things 
manufactured by men’s hands, are imagined capable of exer- 
cising and undergoing the most diverse influences. The Malay) 
miner believes that tin ore may have special affinities for certain 
people and cannot be discovered by others ; and we have noted 
how very important, according to Cushing’s account, is the 
exact shape to be given to familiar objects of manufacture. 
But it does not therefore follow that the tin ore or the 
domestic utensils have a soul conceived by analogy with the 
human soul. It is only permissible to conclude that the primi- 
tive’s ideas of entities and objects and all that relates to them, 
are mystic, and governed by the law of participation. | (It may 
be that at a certain stage in the development of the mentality, | 
the members of a given social group tend both to acquire a | 
more distinct consciousness of their own personality, and to. 
imagine similar personalities outside themselves in animals, | 
trees, rocks, etc., or in gods and spirits. But neither this, 
representation, nor this generalized analogy, is a natural and | 
original product of this mentality. 

Pechuél-Loesche has made a detailed study of this matter, 
as far as the Bafioti of the east coast of Africa are concerned.? 
We cannot here reproduce or even summarize his arguments, 
which are based upon a very meticulous observance of beliefs 
and customs. His conclusion is that such words as “ will ” 
or “soul” or “spirit”? should be altogether eliminated. 
There is indeed something in the beings and the phenomena, 
but it is neither soul nor spirit nor will. If it be absolutely 
necessary to give it expression,.it would be best to use “ dy- 
nanism”’ instead of ‘‘animism.’”’ Pechuél-Loesche quotes a 
traveller of the seventeenth century, according to whom “ these 
people know neither God nor devil, for they cannot give either 
any proper name; but they confine themselves to applying 
the: term mokisie ’ to everything in which they perceive 


t Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 259. 
2 Die Loango-Expedition, iil, 2, pp. 356-7. 


- 


102 HOW NATIVES THINK 


hidden force.” He notes too that the wonder-workers have 
just as much fear of the souls of the dead as the laymen. “If 
one should ask a celebrated nganga by the help of whose soul 
or spirit he is performing, he will look at you without answer- 
ing, with a glance full of fear. He has never had any idea 
of that sort of thing; it is much too dangerous. . . . In 
short, the Bafioti do not know elementals. According to 
them there are forces of power and life existing everywhere 
(and to-day they regard them as proceeding from one supreme 
god)—then there are themselves, and between the two, the souls 
of the dead. There is nothing more. It is with these forces, 
and not with souls or spirits, that ih black magic and its 
opponent, the white magic, operate.” 

It is the same with the most TT aevelopeal tribes of South 
America. ‘The most primitive animist idea consists in 
regarding nature as animate everywhere (Allbescelung) ; 
an idea which is by no means derived as a result of a know- 
ledge of the human soul, but which is formed at the same time 
as that by means of simple analogy.” 2 Junod the missionary 
very aptly expresses the character of this idea of nature. 
‘The Ba-Ronga,’’ he says, “‘ like their allied race, the Bantus, 
are animists. In their eyes, the world is full of spiritual 
influences, sometimes favourable but more often formidable, 
which must be warded off. Do they imagine these clearly ? 
No: their animist ideas are very vague. . . . On the other 
hand, there are two or three conceptions which are very 
familiar to them, and these figure more clearly on the vague 
background of their beliefs. These are their conceptions of 
khombo (misfortune), sila (defilement), and ya (that which 
is forbidden).’’ 3 

Even investigators of the Tylor and Frazer school, in 
describing what they see, use expressions which tend to modify 
their masters’ theory in the way I have indicated. Thus 
‘the root idea,” says Skeat, ‘‘seems to be an all-pervading 
animism, involving a certain common vital principle (Semangat) 
in man and Nature, which, for want of a more suitable word, 
has been here called the Soul.’’4 In the island of Borneo, 

t Die Loango-Expedition, pp. 276-7, 313 

2 eer Ehrenreich, Die Mythen und Legenden der Stid-A mericanischen Urvolker, 


eat 
3 TR AO Les Ba-Ronga, p. 471. 4 Malay Magic, p. 579. 


THE LAW OF PARTICIPATION 103 


the natives “ may be said to attribute a soul or spirit to almost 
every natural agent and to all living things.” But how are 
we to understand this animist doctrine? ‘‘ They feel them- 
selves to be surrounded on every hand by spiritual powers, 
which appear to them to be concentrated in those objects 
to which their attention is directed by practical needs. Adapt- 
ing a mode of expression familiar to psychologists, we may 
say that they have differentiated from a continuum of spiritual 
powers a number of spiritual agents with very various degrees 
of definiteness. Of these the less important are extremely 
vaguely conceived, but are regarded as being able to bring 
harm to men.” 

This continuum of spiritual powers, antecedent to the 
definite individualities which are the result of differentiation, 
we find described in North America in almost exactly the same 
terms by Miss Alice Fletcher. ‘‘ The Indians,” she says, 
“regarded all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena 
as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous and 
similar to the will power they were conscious of in themselves. 
This mysterious power in all things they called Wakonda, and 
through it all things were related to man, and to each other. 
In the idea of the continuity of life, a relation was maintained 
between the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living, and 
also between the fragment of anything and its entirety.” 2 
Would it be possible to bring more thoroughly home, in terms 
of animism, the mystic representations governed by the law 
of participation, which form the basis of prelogical mentality ? 
Finally, in his recent book,3 A. C. Kruijt also admits that, 
instead of the traditional animism, the mentality of primitives 
first of all imagines a continuum of mystic forces, a principle 
of continuous life, an Allbeseelung, and that individualities 
or personalities, souls, spirits, only appear in the second 
place. 3 

It is therefore permissible to believe that, the more carefully 
one collects data, the more one detaches them from the animist 
interpretation which observers have only too frequently 


1 Hose and Macdougall, ‘‘ Men and Animals in Sarawak,” J.A.J., xxxi. 
Pp. 174. 
2 “ The Signification of the Scalp-lock (Omaha Ritual),’” J.A.J., xxvi. 


P- 437: : 
3 Het Animisme in den Indischen Archipel, pp. 1-2 (1906). 


104 HOW NATIVES THINK 


incorporated with them, even unconsciously, the more evident 
it will appear that the mentality of primitives, being mystic, 
is necessarily prelogical also : which means that, preoccupied 
above all with the mystic powers and properties of persons 
and things, it conceives of their relations under the law of 
participation without troubling about contradictions which 
rational thought cannot possibly tolerate. 


CHAPTER III 
THE FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 


I 


Ir would be idle to institute any comparison between the 
discursive processes of prelogical mentality and those of our 
thought, or to look for any correspondence between the two, 
for we should have no grounds on which to base a hypothesis. 
We have no a priori reason for admitting that the same pro- 
cess is used by both. The discursive operations of our rational 
thought—the analysis of which has been made familiar to us 
through psychology and logic—require the existence and the 
employment of much that is intricate, in the form of cate- 
gories, concepts, and abstract terms. They also assume an 
intellectual functioning, properly so called, that is already 
well-differentiated. In short, they imply an ensemble of con- 
ditions which we do not find existing anywhere in social 
aggregates of a primitive type. On the other hand, as we 
have seen, prelogical mentality has its own laws, to which its 
discursive operations must necessarily submit. 

In order to determine what these operations are, and how 
they are accomplished, our only resource is to describe and 
analyse them according to the direct connections we have 
observed between the collective representations. This is a 
most difficult task, both on account of the character of these 
same operations, and of the incompleteness of the documents 
at our disposal. The attempt I am about to make, therefore, 
will undoubtedly yield an imperfect and very unfinished 
outline only, but it will not have been useless if it shows that 
‘The operations of prelogical mentality depend upon the law 
of participation, and cannot be explained apart from it. 

Before we begin to analyse these operations, we must first 
of all say something about the co-existence of the laws ‘of 


106 HOW NATIVES THINK 


contradiction and participation. Are we to suppose that 
certain operations are governed entirely by the first, and 
others just as exclusively by the second, of these laws? Do 
we imagine, for instance, that every individual representation 
is the result of thought that is already logical, whilst collective 
representations alone submit to a law peculiar to prelogical 
mentality ? Water-tight compartments of this kind are incon- 
ceivable, if only because it is very difficult—indeed almost 
impossible—to trace a distinct line of demarcation between 
individual and collective representations. What can be more 
individual, to all appearances, than sense-perceptions ? Never- 
theless we have noted the extent to which the primitive’s 
sense-perceptions are enveloped in mystic elements which 
cannot be separated from them and which undoubtedly are 
collective in their nature. The same may be said of most 
of the emotions experienced and of most of the move- 
ments which take place almost instinctively at the sight 
of a certain object, even quite an ordinary one. In these 
communities as much as in our own, perhaps even more : 
so, the whole mental life of the individual is profoundly 
socialized, 

We must therefore expect to see the influence of the law of 
participation exercised, not only pre-eminently in what we 
have called collective representations, but also making itself 
felt more or less emphatically in all mental operations. Con- 
versely, the effect of the law of contradiction is already more 
or less strong and constant, first of all in operations which 
would be impossible without it (such as numeration, inference, 
etc.) and then also in those which are governed by the law 
of participation. There is nothing but what is changing and 
unstable, and this is one of the greatest difficulties with which 
we have to contend. In the mentality of primitive peoples, 
the logical and prelogical are not arranged in layers and 
separated from each other like oil and water in a glass. They 
permeate each other, and the result is a mixture which is a very 
difficult matter to differentiate. Since the laws of logic abso- 
lutely exclude, in our own thought, everything that is directly 
contrary to itself, we find it hard to get accustomed to a men- 
tality in which the logical and prelogical can be co-existent 
and make themselves equally perceptible in mental processes. 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 107 


The prelogical element which our collective representations 
still contain is too small to enable us to reconstruct a mental 
state in which the prelogical, when dominant, does not exclude 
what is logical. 

What strikes us first of all is that prelogical mentality is 
little given to analysis. Undoubtedly in a certain sense every 
act of thought is synthetic, but when it is a question of logical 
thought this synthesis implies, in nearly every case, a previous 
analysis. Relations are expressed by judgments only after 
the food for thought has first been well digested, and subjected 
to elaboration, differentiation, and classification. Judgment 
deals with ideas which have been rigidly defined, and these are 
themselves the proof and product of previous logical processes. 
This previous work, in which a large number of successive 
analyses and syntheses occur and are recorded, is received 
ready-made by every individual in our communities when he 
first learns to talk, by means of the education inseparably 
bound up with his natural development ; so much so indeed 
that certain philosophers have believed in the supernatural 
origin of language. In this way the claims of logical thought 
are urged, established, and then confirmed in each individual 
mind by the uninterrupted constraining force of his social 
environment, by means of language itself and of what is 
transmitted by language. This is a heritage of which no 
member of our community is deprived, and which none would 
ever dream of refusing. Logical discipline is thus imposed 
upon his mental operations with irresistible force. The fresh 
syntheses which it effects must submit to the definitions of 
the concepts employed, definitions which the previous logical 
operations have legitimatized. In short, his mental activity, 
in whatever form it may be exercised, must submit to the 
law of contradiction. 

The conditions under which prelogical mentality operates 
are altogether different. There is no doubt that it, too, is 
transmitted socially by means of language and concepts 
without which it could not be exercised. It also implies work 
which has been previously accomplished, an inheritance 
handed down from one generation to another. But these 
concepts differ from ours,t and consequently the mental 

t Vide Chap, III. pp. 126-7. 


108 HOW NATIVES THINK 


operations are also different. Prelogical mentality is essen- 
tially synthetic. By this I mean that the syntheses which 
compose it do not imply previous analyses of which the result 
has been registered in definite concepts, as is the case with 
those in which logical thought operates. In other words, the 
connecting-links of the representations are given, as a rule, 
with the representations themselves. In it, too, the syn- 
theses appear to be primitive and, as we have seen in our 
study of perception, they are nearly always both undecomposed 
and undecomposable. This, too, explains why primitive 
mentality seems both impervious to experience and insensible 
to contradiction in so many instances. Collective repre- 
sentations do not present themselves separately to it, nor 
are they analysed and then arranged in logical sequence by 
it. They are always bound up with preperceptions, pre- 
conceptions, preconnections, and we might almost say with 
prejudgments ; and thus it is that primitive mentality, just 
because it is mystical, is also prelogical. 

But, someone may object, if the mental operations of un- — 
civilized peoples differ from logical thinking in their mode 
of functioning, if their paramount law is the law of participa- 
tion, which a priori allows of these preconnections and partici- 
pations of participations which are so infinitely varied, if their 
mentality does finally escape the control of experience, will it 
not appear to us unbridled and unregulated, and just as purely 
arbitrary as it is impenetrable ? Now in nearly all inferior 
races we find, on the contrary, that the mentality is stable, . 
fixed and almost invariable, not only in its essential elements, 
but in the very content and even in the details of its 
representations. The reason is that this mentality, although 
not subordinate to logical processes, or rather, precisely 
because it does not submit to them, is not free. Its uniformity 
reflects the uniformity of the social structure with which it 
corresponds. Institutions fix beforehand, so to speak ne 
varietur, the combinations of collective representations which 
are actually possible. The number of the connecting-links 
between the representations and the methods by which they 
are connected are predetermined at the same time as the 
representations themselves. It is especially in the pre- 
connections thus established that the predominance of the 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 109 


law of participation and the weakness of the strictly intellectual 
claims are made manifest. 

Moreover, collective representations as a rule form part 
of a mystical complex in which the emotional and passionate 
elements scarcely allow thought, as thought, to obtain any 
mastery. To primitive mentality the bare fact, the actual 
object, hardly exists. Nothing presents itself to it that is 
not wrapped about with the elements of mystery: every 
object it perceives, whether ordinary or not, moves it more or 
less, and moves it in a way which is itself predestined by 
tradition. For except for the emotions which are strictly 
individual and dependent upon immediate reaction of the 
organism, there is nothing more socialized among primitives 
than are their emotions. Thus the nature which is perceived, 
felt, and lived by the members of an undeveloped community, 
is necessarily predetermined and unvarying to a certain extent, 
as long as the organized institutions of the group remain un- 
altered. This mystical and prelogical mentality will evolve 
only when the primitive syntheses, the preconnections of 
collective representations are gradually dissolved and decom- 
posed; in other words, when experience and logical claims 
win their way against the law of participation. Then, in 
submitting to these claims, “‘ thought,” properly so called, will 
begin to be differentiated, independent, and free. Intellectual 
operations of a slightly complex kind will become possible, 
and the logical process to which thought will gradually attain, 
is both the necessary condition of its liberty and the indis- 
pensable instrument of its progress. 


IT 


In the first place, in prelogical mentality memory plays 
a much more important part than it does in our mental life, 
in which certain functions which it used to perform have 
been taken from it and transformed. Our wealth of social 
thought is transmitted, in condensed form, through a hierarchy 
of concepts which co-ordinate with, or are subordinate to, 
each other. In primitive peoples it consists of a frequently 
enormous number of involved and complex collective repre- 
sentations. It is almost entirely transmitted through the 


rm 
Py 


IIO | HOW NATIVES THINK 


memory. During the entire course of life, whether in sacred 
or profane matters, an appeal which without our active voli- 
tion induces ws to exercise the logical function, awakens in 
the primitive a complex and often mystic recollection which 
regulates action. And this recollection even has a special tone 
which distinguishes it from ours. The constant use of the 
logical process which abstract concepts involve, the, so to 
speak, natural use of languages relying upon this process, 
disposes our memory preferably to retain the relations which 
have preponderating importance from the objective and logical 
standpoint. In prelogical mentality both the aspect and 
tendencies of memory are quite different because its contents 
are of a different character. It is both very accurate and 
very emotional. It reconstructs the complex collective 
representations with a wealth of detail, and always in the 
order in which they are traditionally connected, according 
to relations which are essentially mystic. Since it thus, to a 
certain extent, supplements logical functions, it exercises the 
privileges of these to a corresponding degree. For instance, 
a representation inevitably evoked as the result of another 
frequently has the quality of a conclusion. Thus it is, 
as we shall see, that a sign is nearly always taken to be 
a cause. 

The preconnections, preperceptions, and preconclusions 
which play so great a part in the mentality of uncivilized 
peoples do not involve any logical activity ; they are simply 
committed to memory. We must therefore expect to find 
the memory extremely well developed in primitives, and 
this is, in fact, reported by observers. But since they un- 
reflectingly assume that memory with these primitives has just 
the same functions as with us, they show themselves both 
surprised and disconcerted by this. It seems to them that it 
is accomplishing marvellous feats, while it is merely being 
exercised in a normal way. ‘“‘ In many respects,’’ say Spencer 
and Gillen of the Australian aborigines, “their memory is 
phenomenal.’”’ ‘‘ Not only does a native know the track of 
every beast and bird, but after examining any burrow, he will 
at.once, from the direction in which the last track runs, tell 
you whether the animal is at home or not. . . . Strange as 
it may sound... the native will recognize the footprint 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY xt 


of every individual of his acquaintance.’’! The earliest 
explorers of Australia had already referred to this marvellous 
power of memory. Thus Grey tells us that three thieves 
were discovered by their footprints. ‘‘I got hold of an in- 
telligent native of the name of Moyee-e-nan, and accompanied 
by him, visited the garden whence the potatoes had been 
stolen ; he found the tracks of three natives, and availing him- 
self of the faculty which they possess of telling who has passed 
from their footmarks, he informed me that the three thieves 
had been the two wives of a native . . . and a little boy 
named Dal-be-an.’”’2 Eyre is astonished at ‘the intimate 
knowledge they have of every nook and corner of the country 
they inhabit ; does a shower of rain fall, they know the very 
rock where a little water is most likely to be collected, the 
very hole where it is the longest retained. . . . Are there 
heavy dews at night, they know where the longest grass grows, 
from which they may collect . . . water in great abundance.”’ 3 
W. E. Roth also draws attention to the exceptional memo- 
rizing powers of the North Queensland aborigines. He has 
heard them “reciting a song the delivery of which takes 
upwards of five nights for its completion (the Molonga set 
of corroborees). . . . The wonder is increased when it is 
remembered that the words are sung in a language of which 
the singers of both localities (ninety miles apart) are entirely 
ignorant. . . . A tribe will learn and sing by rote whole 
corroborees in a language absolutely remote from its own, 
and not one word of which the audience or performers can 
understand the meaning of. That the words are very care- 
fully committed to memory, I have obtained ample proof 
by taking down phonetically the same corroborees as performed 
by different-speaking people living at distances upwards of one 
hundred miles apart.” 4 | 
Von den Steinen has reported similar experiences in his 
explorations of the Xingu basin. “Every tribe knew the 
songs of the neighbouring tribes, without understanding their 


1 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 25. 

2 Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-western and 
Western Australia, ii. p. 351. 

3 Eyre, Expeditions into Central Australia, ii. p. 247.° 

4 W.E. Roth, Ethnographical Studies among the N.W. Central Queensland 
Aborigines, Nos. 191, 199. 


112 HOW NATIVES THINK 


exact meaning, a fact I was able to prove on numerous occa- 
sions.” In a large number of North American tribes we 
find incantations of a sacred character, faithfully transmitted 
from generation to generation, which are not understood, 
either by those who officiate or those who listen. In Africa, 
too, Livingstone likewise expressed surprise at the wonderful 
memory displayed by certain natives. “ These chief’s mes- 
sengers have most retentive memories ; they carry messages 
of considerable length great distances, and deliver them almost 
word for word. Two or three usually go together, and when 
on the way the message is rehearsed every night, in order that 
the exact words may be kept to. One of the native objections 
to learning to write is that these men answer the purpose of 
transmitting intelligence to a distance as well as a letter 
would.” 2 

One specially noticeable form of the memory so highly 
developed in natives is that which preserves to the minutest 
detail the aspect of regions they have traversed, and this 
permits of their retracing their steps with a confidence which 
amazes Europeans. Among the North American Indians 
this topographical memory “is something marvellous ; it is 
quite enough for them to have been in a place once only for 
them to have an exact image of it in their minds, and one which 
will never be lost. However vast and untravelled a forest 
may be, they cross it without losing their way, once they have 
got their bearings. The people of Acadia and the Gulf of 
St. Lawrence would often embark in the frail canoes to go 
to Labrador. . . . They would sail for thirty or forty leagues 
without a compass, and disembark at the precise spot at 
which they had decided to land. . . . Even when the sky 
is overcast, they will follow the sun for several days without 
making a mistake.’ Charlevoix is inclined to attribute this 
to an innate faculty. ‘‘ This gift is inborn ; it is not the result 
of their observations, nor a matter of habit; children who 
have scarcely ever left their village go about with as much 
confidence as those who have travelled the country.” Like 
the Australian aborigines, ‘they have a marvellous gift for 
knowing whether anyone has passed a certain place. On 


1 K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvélkern Zentralbräsiliens, p. 268. 
2 Livingstone, Zambesi and its Tributaries, p. 267 (1865). 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 113 


the shortest grass, the very hardest ground, and even on the 
stones they discover tracks, and by their direction and the 
outline of the foot and the way in which the person has stepped 
aside, they distinguish the footprints of different races, and 
the tracks of men from those of women.” 1 

Pechuël-Loesche, who made a study of similar phenomena 
on the west coast of Africa, rightly distinguishes between what 
he calls the sense of locality (Ovtsinn) and the sense of direction 
(Richtsinn). What we call sense of locality is simply a memory 
for places; it is an acquired aptitude, founded on a very 
strong memorizing faculty, and on the recognition of an infini- 
tude of detail which allows one to return to the same region 
in space... . Beyond and above this sense of locality is 
the feeling of direction (Richtungsgefühl), or the sense of 
direction (Richisinn). It is not a special sense, it is the sense 
of locality carried to its highest degree of perfection, and 
therefore again a form of memory. He who has acquired 
it will never lose his way again. Undoubtedly, “ he will not 
be certain of arriving without fail at a given point, but at 
any rate he will always start in the direction which leads to 
it . . . under the open sky, in the fog, rain, snow, or in the 
depths of night. Nevertheless I have noticed that this sense 
may be entirely at fault in violent storms. . . . Persons gifted 
with a strong sense of locality appear to be exempt from vertigo 
and sea-sickness.” 2 

This analysis help us to understand similar observations 
made by other explorers when speaking of certain individuals 
belonging to primitive peoples. Thus an Australian named 
Miago “‘ could indicate at once and correctly the exact direc- 
tion of our wished-for harbour, when neither sun nor stars 
were shining to assist him. He was tried frequently, and 
under very varying instances, but strange as it may seem, 
he was invariably right. This faculty—though somewhat 
analogous to one I have heard attributed to the natives of 
North America—had very much surprised me when exercised 
on shore, but at sea, out of the sight of land, it seemed beyond 
belief, as assuredly it is beyond explanation.” This same 
Miago ‘‘ remembered accurately the various places we had 


1 Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, ili. p. 239. 
2 Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, pp. 28-9. 
8 


II4 . HOW NATIVES THINK 


visited during the voyage ; he seemed to have carried the 
ship’s track in his memory with the most careful accuracy.” 1 

The same facultv has been noted in Fuegians. “ Niqueaccas 
was so well acquainted with all the coast between 47° and 
the Straits of Magellan that upon being taken to a high hill, 
immediately after landing from a cruise, in which they had 
been far out of sight of land, he pointed out the best harbours 
and places for seal then visible. . . . The boy Bob, when only 
ten years old, was on board the Adonea at sea. As the vessel 
approached land, Low asked him where a harbour could be 
found. As soon as he understood what was meant, which 
was an affair of some difficulty, for he could then speak but 
very little English, he got up on the vessel’s bulwark, and 
looked anxiously around. After some hesitation, he pointed 
to a place where the ship might go, and then went to the lead- 
line, and made signs to Mr. Low that he must sound as he 
approached the land... an extraordinary proof of the 
degree in which the perceptive and retentive faculties are 
enjoyed by these savages.”’ 2 ) 

It was evidently a case of thoroughly well-developed 
“sense of locality ’’ attaining the degree of superiority in 
which it becomes, as Pechuél-Loesche calls it, a feeling of 
direction, but there is nothing marvellous in it but a local 
memory that is out of the common. 

Von den Steinen has given us a good, though less surprising, 
description of a similar case. ‘‘ Antonio (a Bakairi) would see 
and hear everything, and commit to memory the most insig- 
nificant details, and by means of such signs of locality he 
exercised the faculty which educated people call the sense of 
direction. If I had not convinced myself by frequently 
questioning him I could scarcely have believed that anybody, 
without written notes, could have acquired in a single voyage 
on an ordinary river so exact a knowledge of the special 
features of its course. Antonio not only remembered every 
bend but he was able to tell me when I asked him, whether 
there were two or three bends before we arrived at such and 
such a place. He had the map of it in his head; or, to 


t Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, i. pp. 222-3 (1846). 
a Fitzroy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of the ‘ Adventure" and the 
“ Beagle,’ ü. pp. 192-3. 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 115 


express it more accurately, he had retained in their right 
order a number of apparently unimportant facts such as a 
tree here, a gunshot there, a little further on some bees, and 
so on.’’ ! 

This extraordinary development of memory, and of a 
memory which faithfully reproduces the minutest details of 
sense-impressions in the correct order of their appearance, 
is shown moreover by the wealth of vocabulary and the gram- 
matical complexity of the languages. Now the very men who 
speak these languages and possess this power of memory are 
(in Australia or Northern Brazil, for instance) incapable of 
counting beyond two or three. The slightest mental effort 
involving abstract reasoning, however elementary it may 
be, is so distasteful to them that they immediately declare 
themselves tired and give it up. We must admit therefore, 
as we have already said, that with them memory takes the 
place (at very great cost, no doubt, but at any rate it does take 
the place) of operations which elsewhere depend upon a logical 
process. With us, in everything that relates to intellectual 
functions, memory is confined to the subordinate rôle of regis- 
tering the results which have been acquired by a logical 
elaboration of concepts. But to prelogical mentality, recol- 
lections are almost exclusively highly complex representations 
which succeed each other in unvarying order, and in which 
the most elementary of logical operations would be very 
difficult (since language does not lend itself thereto), supposing 
that tradition allowed of their being attempted, and granting 
that individuals possessed enough boldness to entertain the 
idea. Our thought, in so far as it is abstract, solves at one 
swoop a great number of problems implied in one single state- 
ment, provided that the terms employed are sufficiently general 
and definite. This is what prelogical mentality could. not 
even imagine, and this accordingly makes it so difficult for 
us to reconstruct such a mentality. The amanuensis of the 
eleventh century who laboriously reproduced page by page 
the manuscript which was the object of his pious endeavour, 
is no further removed from the rotary machine of the great 
newspaper offices which prints off hundreds of thousands of 
copies in a few hours, than is prelogical mentality, in which 


t K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvélkern Zentralbräsiliens, pp. 155-7. 


110. HOW NATIVES THINK 


the connections between the representations are preformed, 
and which makes use of memory almost entirely, from logical 
thought, with its marvellous stock of abstract concepts. 


AS 


III AX VS 


y 

Are we to take it for granted, then, that this mentality, 
even in the very lowest social aggregates, makes no use of 
concepts whatever? Certainly not: the ofttimes compli- 
cated language that it speaks, the institutions transmitted 
from generation to generation, are sufficient to prove the 
contrary. Yet the concepts that are used in such aggregates for 
the most part differ from our own. The mind that forms 
and employs them is not merely prelogical. It is essentially 
mystic, and if its mystic character determines, as we have 
already seen, the way in which it perceives, it exercises no 
less influence upon its methods of abstraction and generaliza- 
tion, that is, the way in which it creates its concepts. Especi- 


* al 
M 


ally in that which concerns representations which are strictly 


collective, prelogical mentality most frequently arrives at 
its abstraction by the law of participation. One can imagine 
that it is extremely difficult to give proof of this, the testimony 
afforded by observers being necessarily interpreted by concepts 
with which they are familiar, and which come within the limits 
of our logical thought. Nevertheless Spencer and Gillen 
have reported a certain number of facts. which permit of 
our seeing fairly clearly how prelogical mentality practises 
abstraction. 

‘“ When asked the meaning of certain drawings . . . the 
natives will constantly answer that they are only play work, and 
mean nothing .. . but . . . similar drawings, only drawn on 
some ceremonial object or in a particular spot, have a very 
definite meaning. . . . The same native will tell you that a 
special drawing in one spot has no meaning, and yet he will 
tell you exactly what it is supposed to signify when drawn 
in a different spot. The latter, it may be remarked, is 
always on what we may call sacred ground, near to which 
the women may not come.” !—‘‘ A nurtunja (a sacred pole), 
is symbolic of one, and only one, thing, though, as far as 

1 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 617. 


ie 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 117 


its appearance and structure are concerned, it may be pre- 
cisely similar to a nurtunja which means something totally 
different. Suppose, for example, as on the last occasion, a 
large churinga or a nurtunja represented a gum-tree, then, 
in the mind of the native it becomes so closely associated 
with that object that it cannot possibly mean anything else ; 
and if a precisely similar churinga or nurtunja were wanted 
an hour afterwards to represent, say an emu, then a new one 
must be made.’’! Conversely, the same object, in different 
circumstances, may have very diverse meanings. “The 
various parts of the waninga’’ (a sacred symbol of a totemic 
animal or plant) ‘‘ have very different meanings, but it must 
be remembered that the same structure will mean one thing 
when it is used in connection with one totem, and quite a 
different thing when used in connection with another.” 2 
Finally, with regard to designs which seem to have a geometric 
appearance, which have been collected from these same abori- 
gines, Spencer and Gillen say : ‘‘ The origin of these geometric 
drawings is quite unknown, and their meaning, if they have 
one, is a purely conventional one. Thus, for example, a 
spiral or series of concentric circles incised on the face of one 
particular churinga will signify a gum-tree, and a precisely 
similar design on another churinga will indicate a frog.” 3 

Here we have very clear instances of what we shall call 
mystic abstraction which, different as it is from logical abstrac- 
tion, is none the less the process which primitive mentality 
would frequently make use of. In fact, if exclusive attention 
be one of the primary conditions of abstraction, and if exclusive 
attention be necessarily paid to the features which are most 
interesting and important to the subject, we know which 
these features will be to a mentality which is mystic and 
prelogical. Beyond and above aught else, they are those which 
establish relations between the visible, tangible, concrete 
objects and the invisible and mysterious forces which compass 
them about, the spirits, phantoms, souls, etc., which secure 
to persons and things their mystic properties and powers. 
The attention of primitives, like their perception, is oriented 
differently from our own Their abstraction accordingly 


t The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 346. 2 Ibid., p. 308. 
3 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 697. 


118 HOW NATIVES THINK 


is carried out differently, and dominated by the law of 
participation. 

Such abstraction is very difficult for us to reconstruct 
effectively. How are we to understand the fact reported by 
Spencer and Gillen in the first of the observations just quoted : 
that two precisely similar drawings when found in different 
places may represent, in the one case, a certain definite object, 
and in the other, nothing at all? To our minds, the most 
essential relation which a drawing bears is that of resemblance. 
Undoubtedly such a drawing may possess a symbolic and 
religious significance and at the same time arouse mystic 
ideas accompanied by strong emotions: such drawings, for 
instance, as the frescoes of Fra Angelico in St. Mark’s, Florence. 
But those are features which are evoked by association of 
ideas and the resemblance remains the fundamental relation. 
On the contrary, that which interests prelogical mentality 
above all is the relation of the semblance, as of the object 
represented, to the mystic force within it. Without such 
participation, the form of the object or the design is a negli- 
gible factor. 


This is the reason that the design, when traced or engraved 
upon a sacred object, is more than a semblance ; it participates 
in the sacred nature of the object and is imbued with its power. 


1 Thus the European observer, when attempting to interpret the designs 
made by primitives, is nearly sure to go wrong. Von den Steinen proved 
this in Brazil. On his side Parkinson says: ‘‘ We find ourselves faced with 
a difficult problem. The Mitteilungen sees in these drawings serpents, and 
in fact there is something that recalls the head and body of such; but the 
Baining affirm that they represent pigs. . . . The figure that follows might 
if necessary pass for a face, but according to the natives, it represents a club, 
though it has not the remotest resemblance to such a thing. Certainly 
nobody in the wildest flights of imagination would have conceived of such 
an explanation. . . . I was inclined to regard the three circular forms which 
follow, as eyes, but the natives robbed me of this illusion, assuring me that 
eyes could not be reproduced. The explanations of the decorations have 
been given me by the Baining themselves; there can be no doubt on this 
point therefore, since those who execute them associate a definite idea with 
their drawings, although in nearly every case we are unable to see the con- 
nection, for the design does not in any way resemble the object in question. 
We see how incorrect it is to interpret the ornamental decorations of a primitive 
people according to their resemblance to any object known to us. The 
Baining see in these conventional designs a shell, a leaf, a human form, etc. 
The idea is so firmly fixed in their minds that one can see the stupefied wonder 
on their faces when they are asked the meaning of these designs : they cannot 
conceive that anybody should fail to recognize at once the meaning of 
the decorations ”” (Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee, pp. 621-7 ; cf. pp. 
234, 235). 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY xrr9 


When this same design is found elsewhere, upon an object 
which possesses no sanctity, it is less than asemblance. Having 
no mystic signification, it has none of any kind. 

The details which Catlin gives us in his tales of the portraits 
which he made of the Mandan chiefs confirms this view. 
Catlin talks incessantly of the surprise and fear which the sight 
of these portraits excited in the Mandans. Nevertheless these 
same Indians, from time immemorial, were accustomed to 
represent the most striking events in their history, and even 
rude traces of the chiefs’ features, on their banners. How 
then are we to explain the terror which these portraits of 
Catlin’s caused? By their greater fidelity to the originals ? 
No. The truth was that the Mandans found themselves 
confronted by unwonted semblances, implying a mystic 
participation hitherto unknown to them, and consequently, 
like everything unknown, highly dangerous. Their own 
drawings also expressed participation, but it was a definite 
one, hence their security. Those made by Catlin expressed 
a different one, because the methods he used were strange 
to them, and his likenesses were “speaking.” Thus in this 
case, as in the preceding ones, prelogical mentality makes its 
abstraction from the mystic standpoint. If there is no mystic 
participation felt, the form of the likeness is unperceived, or 
at any rate, does not arrest the attention. This is what the 
European observer interprets by saying that the design has 
then ‘‘no meaning whatever.’ It does not mean that the 
primitive fails to recognize the design, but that unless he 
abstracts mystically, he makes no abstraction at all. 

The note which relates to the nurtunja is equally clear. 
The Aruntas cannot imagine that the same nurtunja figures 
first as a tree, and then as an emu: rather than that, they take 
the trouble of making a second nurtunja, otherwise exactly 
like the first, when they want to represent the emu. In this 
we might see a ritual observance which does not allow of 
the same object being used, with a religious significance, 
more than once. But Spencer and Gillen sweep away such 
an explanation. They explicitly state that the Aruntas 
attribute a different signification to two objects which are 
similar. It is an admirable instance of mystic abstraction. 
One of the two nurtunja participates mystically of the nature 


120 HOW NATIVES THINK 


of the tree, the other of the emu’s nature, and this suffices 
to render them totally different, so that one cannot be sub- 
stituted for the other. Their identity in form does not interest 
the Aruntas any more than we should be interested in the 
identical sounds of “‘ weigh’”’ and “‘ way,” for instance. Just 
as we constantly use these words without paying any attention 
to that identity, so prelogical mentality remains indifferent 
to the resemblance in form between the two objects. Its 
attention is fixed on the mystic participation which gives each 
its sacred character. 

Similarly, on a certain churinga, one design represents a 
gum-tree ; on another an absolutely similar design stands for 
a frog, and the observers conclude accordingly that to the 
Australian aborigines these designs bear a purely “ conven- 
tional’? meaning. They ought not to say “conventional,” 
but ‘‘ mystic’’ however. The design possesses no interest 
but in so far as it realizes a mystic participation, and this, in 
its turn, depends entirely upon the mystic nature of the 
churinga upon the surface of which the design has been traced. 
Their resemblance is no more noticed by the primitive than 
would the relative places of tonic and fifth in different scales 
be regarded by the musician when he looks at his score. 
Spencer and Gillen themselves say that an arrangement that 
signifies one thing when used in connection with a certain 
totem is something quite different when it relates to another. 
But the churinga have the same mystic character as the totems, 
and thus the same participations become possible. 

From the first observation recorded above it follows that 
the place occupied by a person, an object, an image is of para- 
mount importance, at any rate in some cases, to the mystic 
properties of such a person, object, or image. There is a 
corresponding participation between a definite place, as a place, 
and the objects and entities which are found there, and it 
thus possesses certain mystic properties peculiar to it. To the 
primitive mind space does not appear as a homogeneous 
unity, irrespective of that which occupies it, destitute of 
properties and alike everywhere. On the contrary, each social 
group among the tribes of Central Australia, for instance, 
feels itself mystically bound up with the portion of ground it 
occupies or travels over; it has no conception that it might 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY xr2r 


occupy another, or that some other group might inhabit 
the region it fills. Between the soil and the group participa- 
tions exist, amounting to a kind of mystic property which 
cannot be transferred, stolen, or acquired by conquest. More- 
over, in the region thus defined, each locality with its charac- 
teristic aspect and form, its own peculiar rocks and trees, 
springs and sand-heaps, etc., is in mystic union with the 
visible or invisible beings who have revealed their presence 
there, or dwell there, and with the individual spirits who there 
await their reincarnation. Between themselves and their 
locality there is reciprocal participation: without them it 
could not be what it is, and it is equally necessary to make 
them what they are. This it is which Spencer and Gillen 
designate ‘local relationship,” ! and it accounts for those 
“totemic pilgrimages’’ of which they have furnished so 
interesting a description. 

But if it be thus, we have fresh reason for believing that 
the prelogical mind does not, in general, practise abstraction 
at all as ours are accustomed to do. The condition of our 
abstraction is the logical homogeneity of the concepts which 
permits of their combination. Now this homogeneity is 
closely bound up with the homogeneous representation of 
space.\ If the prelogical mind, on the contrary, imagines the 
various regions in space as differing in quality, as determined 
by their mystic participations with such and such groups of 
persons or objects, abstraction as we usually conceive of it 
becomes very difficult to such a mind, and we shall find that 
its place is taken by the mystic abstraction which is the result 
of the law of participation. 


IV 


The principles and processes peculiar to prelogical mentality 
appear to stand out more distinctly when it generalizes even 
than when it is a case of abstracting. I am not speaking 
of concepts which more or less resemble our own, the existence 
of which is testified by the linguistic vocabulary, and which 


t The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 14, 303, 544; The Northern 
Tribes of Central Australia, p. 29. 


122 | HOW NATIVES THINK 


fairly represent what have been termed generic ideas, such as 
man, woman, dog, tree, and so on. In the following chapter 
we shall find that the element of generality in these concepts 
is usually restricted and counterbalanced by the very special 
determination of the classes of beings or objects they designate. 
With this exception such concepts correspond very fairly 
with certain of our general ideas. But in the collective repre- 
sentations, properly so called, of primitives, particularly in 
those relating to their institutions and religious beliefs, we 
find generalizations of quite a different kind, which it is ex- 
tremely difficult for us to reconstruct, the analysis of which 
would probably allow us to seize the mystic and prelogical 
mind in the very act, as it were. We might endeavour to 
trace back such generalizations, starting, for instance, from 
certain myths and certain totemic beliefs which are attested 
by rites and ceremonies. But if it be possible it would 
be better still to apprehend them directly, and in the 
very combination of the elements which form them. In 
Lumholtz’ excellent works upon Unknown Mexico, we find — 
observations with respect to the Huichol Indians which 
throw strong light upon the way in which the prelogical 
mind generalizes. 

“Corn, deer, and hikuli ” (a sacred plant) “are, in a way, 
one and the same thing to the Huichol.’’! At first this identi- 
fication seems absolutely inexplicable. To make it intelligible, 
Lumholtz explains it on utilitarian grounds: ‘‘ Corn is deer 
(food substance) and hikuli is deer (food substance) and corn 
is hikuli . . . all being considered identical in so far as they 
are food substances.’”’! This explanation is a probable one, 
and it undoubtedly becomes the one held by the Huichols 
themselves as the forms of their ancient faiths gradually lose 
their primitive meaning in their minds. But according to 
Lumholtz’ own explanation, the Huichols who express them- 
selves thus view the matter from another aspect: it is the 
mystic properties in these things, so differently regarded by 
us, that unites them in one and the same idea. The hikuli is 
a sacred plant which men (destined and prepared for this 
end by a series of very complicated rites) gather every year 
with great ceremonial, in a remote district, and at the cost 

| tC, Lumholtz, Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, p. 22. 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 123 


of much fatigue and personal privation: the existence and 
the well-being of the Huichols are mystically connected with 
the harvesting of this plant. Their corn harvest is absolutely 
dependent upon it. If the hikuli were to fail, or were not 
gathered according to the obligatory rites, the cornfields 
would not yield their usual crops. But deer, in their relations 
with the tribe, present the same mystic characteristics. Deer- 
hunting, which takes place at a certain definite time of year, 
is an essentially religious function. The welfare and preserva- 
tion of the Huichols depends on the number of deer killed at 
this time, just as they depend upon the quantity of hikuli 
which is gathered; and the chase is accompanied by the 
Same ceremonial practices and evokes the same collective 
emotions as the search for the sacred plant. Hence results 
the identification of the hikuli, deer, and corn, which we find 
asserted several times over. 

“A layer of straw had been spread outside of the temple 
at the right side of the entrance, and on this the deer was 
carefully deposited. It was thus received in the same way 
as the corn-rolls, because in the Indian conception, corn is 
deer. According to the Huichol myth, corn was once a 
deer.’”’ —‘‘ To the Huichol so closely are corn, deer, and hikuli 
associated that by consuming the broth of the deer meat and 
the hikuli they think the same effect is produced, namely, 
making the corn grow. Therefore, when clearing the fields 
they eat the hikuli before starting the day’s work.”’ 2 

It seems then that in these collective representations of 
the Huichols (representations which are inseparable, as we 
know, from intense religious emotions, which are also collec- 
tive), the hikuli, deer, and corn participate in mystic qualities 
of the highest importance to the tribe, and, for this reason, 
are considered as “‘the same thing.” This participation, 
which rs felt by them, does not present the confusion which we, 
despite all our efforts, see in it. Just because their collective 
representations are bound together by the law of participation, 
nothing seems simpler or more natural to them and, we may 
add, more necessary. The prelogical and mystic mentality 
is exercised in this way without constraint or effort, and 
without being yet controlled by the claims of logical thought. 

1 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, ii. p. 45. a Ibid, ii. p. 268. 


124 HOW NATIVES THINK 


But this is not all, and Lumholtz will show us how the 
participations just instanced are compatible with others of 
a like nature. ‘It has been pointed out,” he writes, “ that 
the deer is considered identical with hikuli and hikuli identical 
with corn, and certain insects identical with corn. The same 
tendency to consider heterogeneous objects as identical may 
be observed in the fact that a great variety of objects are 
considered as plumes. Clouds, cotton wool, the white tail of 
a deer, the deer’s antlers, and even the deer itself are con- 
sidered as plumes, and all serpents are believed to have 
plumes.” 1 Here, then, we have the deer, which was already 
corn, and hikuli, which is also plumes. Lumbholtz frequently 
lays stress upon this. ‘‘ Hairs from the tail of a deer are tied 
round outside of the feathers ’’ (on a ceremonial arrow). “It 
will be remembered that not only are deer-antlers plumes, 
but also the deer himself, and here is a striking illustration of 
the conception of the animal, his hair being employed in the 
place of feathers.’’ 2 

Now we know from other passages that to the Huichol 
mind feathers possess mystic properties of a very special kind. 
‘“‘ Birds, especially eagles and hawks . . . hear everything ; 
and the same is the case with their plumes ; they also hear, the 
Indians say, and have mystic powers. Plumes are to the 
Huichols health, life, and luck-giving symbols. By their help, 
the shamans are capable of hearing everything that is said 
to them from below the earth and from all the points of the 
world, and perform magic feats. The feathers of the vulture 
and of the raven are not considered as plumes. All plumes 
are desirable as attachments to ceremonial objects ; therefore 
a Huichol has never too many of them. There is, however, 
one plume of special merit, and that is, strange to say, the 
deer. Everyone who kills a deer comes into possession of a 
precious plume, that insures him health and luck. . . . Not 
only the antler, but the whole body of the deer is, in the Huichol 
mind, a plume, just as a bird is called a plume; and I have 
met with instances where the hair from the tail of a deer 
actually served as plume attachments on ceremonial arrows.”’ 3 

It is, then, the presence of mystic qualities both in birds 


1 C. Lumholtz, Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, p. 212. 
2 Ibid., p. 96. 3 Ibid., p. 21. 


ap 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 125 


(and their feathers) and the deer (and the hair of its tail) which 
makes the Huichol saying: ‘‘ The deer is a plume ” intelli- 
gible. Lumholtz accounts for this as due to “a strong 
tendency to see analogies ; what to us are called heterogeneous 
phenomena are by them considered as identical.” 1 But 
what really is this tendency? And how can the Huichols 
perceive any analogy between an eagle’s feather, a grain of 
corn, the body of a deer, the hikuli plant, if it be not mystic 
analogies, and all the more so, because it is not merely a 
question of analogy or association, but of identity ? Lum- 
holtz is very emphatic on this point: to the Huichols, the 
deer is hikuli, the hikuli is corn, the corn 7s a plume.—Else- 
where we learn that most gods and goddesses ave serpents, 
and so are the pools of water and the springs in which the 
deities live: so too are the staffs used by the gods. From 
the standpoint of logical thought, such “identities ” are, and 
remain, unintelligible. One entity is the symbol of another, 
but not that other. But to the prelogical mind these identi- 
ties are comprehensible, for they are identities of participa- 
tion. The deer ts hikuli, or corn, or plume, just as the Bororo 
is an arara, and as, in general, the member of a totemic group 
is his totem. The facts Lumholtz has related are of pro- 
found significance. It is by virtue of participation that the 
eagle’s feather possesses the same mystic properties as the 
eagle itself, and the whole body of the deer the same as those 
in its tail; and it is by virtue of participation, too, that the 
deer becomes identified with the eagle’s plume or the hikuli 
plant. 

Without insisting further on this point, we have here the 
principle of a generalization which proves disconcerting to 
logical thought, but is quite natural to prelogical mentality. 
It is presented to our minds in the form of that which, for 
want of a better term, we have called the preconnections of 
the collective representations, since ‘identities ’’ of the kind 
we have been considering always occur to each individual 
mind at the same time as the representations themselves, and 
this accounts for the profound difference between these “ repre- 
sentations ’’ and our own, even when it is a case of fairly 
general concepts which are somewhat similar. When a 


1 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, ii. p. 233. 


126 HOW NATIVES THINK 


primitive, an Australian or Indian, for instance, imagines 
‘* deer ’’ or “‘ plume ”’ or “‘ cloud,” the generic image presented 
to his mind implies something quite different from the some- 
what analogous image which the European mind would conjure 
up in the same circumstances. 

Our concepts are surrounded by an atmosphere of logical 
potentiality. This is what Aristotle meant when he said 
that we never think of the particular as such. When I imagine 
Socrates as an individual, I think of the man Socrates at the 
same moment. When I see my horse or my dog, I certainly 
perceive their special characteristics, but these also as belong- 
ing to the species horse or dog. Strictly speaking, their image 
may be imprinted on my retina and appear to my consciousness 
as quite distinctive, as long as I am not paying attention 
to it. But directly I apprehend it, it is inseparable from 
everything connoted by the terms “horse” and “ dog ’”’— 
that is, not only from an infinite number of other potential 
images like the first, but also from the sustained consciousness 
which I have both of myself and of a possible, logically ordered, — 
conceivable world of experience. And since each of my 
concepts can be broken up into others which in their turn 
can be analysed, I know that I can pass from these to others 
by definite stages which are the same for all minds resembling | 
my own. I know that logical processes, if they be correct, 
and their elements drawn from experience as they should be, 
will lead me to definite results which experience will confirm, 
however far I may pursue them. In short, logical thought 
implies, more or less consciously, a systematic unity which is 
best realizable in science and philosophy. And the fact that 
it can lead to this is partially due to the peculiar nature of its 
concepts, to their homogeneity and ordered regularity. This 
is material which it has gradually created for itself, and 
without which it would not have been able to develop. 

Now this material is not at the command of the primitive 
mind. Primitive mentality does indeed possess a language, 
but its structure, as a rule, differs from that of our languages. 
It actually does comprise abstract representations and general 
ideas; but neither this abstraction nor this generalization 
resembles that of our concepts. Instead of being surrounded 
by an atmosphere of logical potentiality, these representations 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 127 


welter, as it were, in an atmosphere of mystic possibilities. 
There is no homogeneity in the field of representation, and for 
this reason logical generalization, properly so called, and logical 
transactions with its concepts are impracticable. The element 
of generality consists in the possibility—already predetermined 
—of mystic action and reaction by entities upon each other, or 
of common mystic reaction in entities which differ from each 
other. Logical thought finds itself dealing with a scale of 
general concepts varying in degree, which it can analyse or 
synthesize at will. Prelogical thought busies itself with col- 
lective representations so interwoven as to give the impression 
of a community in which members would continually act 
and react upon each other by virtue of their mystic qualities, 
participating in, or excluding, each other. 


V 


Since abstraction and generalization mean this for pre- 
logical mentality, and its preconnections of collective repre- 
sentations are such, it is not difficult to account for its classi- 
fication of persons and things, strange as it frequently appears 
to us. Logical thought classifies by means of the very opera- 
tions which form its concepts. These sum up the work of 
analysis and synthesis which establishes species and genera, 
and thus arranges entities according to the increasing generality 
of the characters observed in them. In this sense classifica- 
tion is not a process which differs from those which «have 
preceded or will follow it. It takes place at the same time as 
abstraction and generalization: it registers their results, as 
it were, and its value is precisely what theirs has been. It 
is the expression of an order of interdependence, of hierarchy 
among the concepts, of reciprocal connection between persons 
and things, which endeavours to correspond as precisely as 
possible with the objective order in such a way that concepts 
thus arranged are equally valid for real objects and real persons. 
It was the governing idea which directed Greek philosophical 
thought, and which inevitably appears as soon as the logical 
mind reflects upon itself and begins consciously to pursue 
the end to which it at first tended spontaneously. 

But to the primitive mind this predominating concern for 


128 HOW NATIVES THINK 


objective validity which can be verified is unknown. Charac- 
teristics which can be discerned by experience, in the sense in 
which we understand it, characteristics which we call objec- 
tive, are of secondary importance in its eyes, or are important 
only as signs and vehicles of mystic qualities. Moreover, the 
primitive mind does not arrange its concepts in a regular order. 
It perceives preconnections, which it would never dream of 
changing, between the collective representations; and these 
are nearly always of greater complexity than concepts, properly 
so called. Therefore what can its classifications be? Per- 
force determined at the same time as the preconnections, they 
too are governed by the law of participation, and will present 
the same prelogical and mystic character. They will betoken 
the orientation peculiar to such a mind. 

The facts already quoted are sufficient proof of this. When 
the Huichols, influenced by the law of participation, affirm 
the identity of corn, deer, hikuli and plumes, a kind of 
classification has been established between their represen- 
tations, a classification the governing principle of which is 
a common presence in these entities, or rather the circulation 
among these entities, of a mystic power which is of supreme 
importance to the tribe. The only thing is that this classifica- 
tion does not, as it should do in conformity with our mental 
processes, become compacted in a concept which is more 
comprehensive than that of the objects it embraces. For 
them it suffices for the objects to be united, and felt as such, 
in a complexity of collective representations whose emotional 
force fully compensates, and even goes beyond, the authority 
which will be given to general concepts by their logical validity 
at a later stage. 

In this way the classifications to which Durkheim and 
Mauss have called our attention, noting their very different 
characteristics from those which distinguish our logical classi- 
fications, may again be explained. In many undeveloped 
peoples—in Australia, in West Africa, according to Dennett’s 
recent book,! among the North American Indians, in China 
and elsewhere—we find that all natural objects—animals, 
plants, stars, cardinal points, colours, inanimate nature in 
general—are arranged, or have been originally arranged, in 

t At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind (London, 1906). 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 129 


the same classes as the members of the social group, and if the 
latter are divided into so many totems, so, too, are the trees, 
rivers, stars, etc. A certain tree will belong to such and such 
a class, and will be used exclusively to manufacture the 
weapons, coffins, etc., of men who are members of it. The 
sun, according to the Aruntas, is a Panunga woman, that is, 
she forms part of the sub-group which can only intermarry 
with members of the Purula sub-group. Here we have some- 
thing analogous with that which we have already noticed 
about associated totems and local relationship, a mental 
habit quite different from our own, which consists in bringing 
together or uniting entities preferably by their mystic parti- 
cipations. This participation, which is very strongly felt 
between members of the same totem or the same group, 
between the ensemble of these members and the animal or 
plant species which is their totem, is also felt, though un- 
doubtedly to a lesser degree, between the totemic group and 
those who have the same location in space. We have proofs 
of this in the Australian aborigines and in the North American 
Indians, where the place of each group in a common camping- 
ground is very precisely determined according to whether 
it comes from north or south or from some other direction. 
Thus it is felt once more between this totemic group and one 
of the cardinal points, and consequently between this group 
and all that participates in it, on the one hand, and this cardinal 
point and all that participates in it (its stars, rivers, trees, 
and so forth), on the other. 

In this way is established a complexity of participations, 
the full explanation of which would demand exhaustive 
acquaintance with the beliefs and the collective representations 
of the group in all their details. They are the equivalent of, 
or at least they correspond with, what we know as classi- 
fications: the social participations being the most intensely 
felt by each individual consciousness and serving as a nucleus, 
as it were, around which other participations cluster. But 
in this there is nothing at all resembling, save in appearance, 
our logical classifications. These involve a series of concepts 
whose extent and connotation are definite, and they constitute 
an ascending scale the degrees of which reflection has tested. 
The prelogical mind does not objectify nature thus. It lives 


9 


130 HOW NATIVES THINK 


it rather, by feeling itself participate in it, and feeling these 
participations everywhere; and it interprets this complexity 
of participations by social forms. If the element of generality 
exists, it can only be sought for in the participation extending 
to, and the mystic qualities circulating among, certain entities, 
uniting them and identifying them in the collective 
representation. 

In default of really general concepts, therefore, primitive 
mentality is conversant with collective representations which 
to a certain extent take their place. Although concrete, 
such representations are extremely comprehensive ih this 
respect, that they are constantly employed, that they readily 
apply to an infinite number of cases, and that from this point 
of view they correspond, as we have said, with what categories 
are for logical thought. But their mystic and concrete nature 
has often puzzled investigators. These did indeed note its 
importance and could not fail to draw attention to it, though 
at the same time they realized that they were face to face 
with a method of thinking which was opposed to their own — 
mental habits. Some examples in addition to those already 
quoted will help to make us realize these representations, 
which are general without however being at the same time 
abstract. 

In the Yaos,t Hetherwick notes beliefs which appear in- 
comprehensible to him. He cannot understand how it is that 
the lisoka (the soul, shade or spirit) can be at once both per- 
sonal and impersonal. In fact, after death the asoka becomes 
mulungu. This word has two meanings: one, the soul of the 
dead, the other, “‘ the spirit world in general, or more properly 
speaking the aggregate of the spirits of all the dead.” This 
would be conceivable if mulungu meant a collective unity formed 
by the union of all the individual spirits ; but this explanation 
is not permissible, for at the same time mulungu signifies “a 
state or property inhering in something, as life or health inheres 
in the body, and it is also regarded as the agent in anything 
mysterious. ‘It is mulungu’ is the Yao exclamation on 
being shown anything that is beyond the range of his under- 
standing.” This is a characteristic trait which we shall find 


1 Hetherwick, ‘‘ Some Animistic Beliefs among the Yaos of Central Africa,” 
J'A.I., xxxii. pp. 89-95. 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 131 


in all collective representations of this nature: they are used 
indifferently to indicate a person or persons, or a quality or 
property of a thing. 

To get out of the difficulty, Hetherwick distinguishes 
between what he calls ‘three stages of animistic belief: 
(x) the human /isoka or shade, the agent in dreams, delirium, 
etc.; (2) this lisoka regarded as mulungu, and an object of 
worship and reverence, the controller of the affairs of this life, 
the active agent in the fortunes of the human race; (3) mu- 
lungu as expressing the great spirit agency, the creator of the 
world and all life, the source of all things animate or inani- 
mate.’ Itseems as if Hetherwick, like the French missionaries 
of old in New France, tends to interpret what he observes 
by the light of his own religious beliefs, but he adds, in good 
faith: ‘And yet between these three conceptions of the 
spirit nature no definite boundary line can be drawn. The 
distinction in the native mind is ever of the haziest. No 
one will give you a dogmatic statement of his belief on such 
points.” 

If Hetherwick did not get from the Yaos the answers he 
wanted, it may possibly have been because the Yaos did not 
understand his questions, but it was largely because he did 
not grasp their ideas. To the Yaos the transit from the 
personal soul, before or after death, to the impersonal soul 
or to the mystic quality which pervades every object in which 
there is something divine, sacred and mystic (not super- 
natural, for on the contrarv nothing is more natural to primi- 
tive mentality than this kind of mystic power) is not felt. 
To tell the truth, there is not even such transit: there is 
“identity governed by the law of participation ” such as 
we found in the case of the Huichols, entirely different from 
logical identity. And through the perpetual working of the 
law of participation, the mystic principle thus circulating 
and spreading among entities may be represented indiffer- 
ently as a person or subject, or a property or power of 
the objects which share it, and consequently an attribute. 
Prelogical mentality does not consider there is any difficulty 
about this. 

It is the same with the North American Indians, about 
whom we have abundant and definite information. Miss 


132 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Alice Fletcher,! in describing the mysterious power called 
wakanda, writes of their idea of the continuity of life, by 
which ‘‘ a relation was maintained between the seen and the 
unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the fragment 
of anything and its entirety.’”’ Here continuity means what 
we call participation, since this continuity obtains between 
the living and the dead; between a man’s nail-parings, 
saliva, or hair and the man himself; between a certain bear 
or buffalo and the mystic ensemble of the bear or buffalo 
species. 

Moreover, like the mulungu just spoken of, wakanda or 
wakan may signify not only a mystic reality, like that which 
Miss Fletcher calls “life,” but a characteristic, a quality 
belonging to persons and things. Thus there are wakan 
men, who have gone through many previous existences. 
‘““They arise to conscious existence in the form of winged 
seeds, such as the thistle, . . . and pass through a series of 
inspiration, with different classes of divinities, till they are 
fully wakamzed and prepared for human incarnation. They — 
are invested with the invisible wakan powers of the gods. . . .’’ 2 
Similarly, day and night are wakan. The term is explained 
thus by an Indian: ‘‘ While the day lasts a man is able to 
do many wonderful things, kill animals, men, etc. . . . But 
he does not fully understand why the day is, nor does he know 
who makes or causes the light. Therefore he believes that it 
was not made by hand, i.e. that no human being makes the 
day give light. Therefore the Indians say that the day is 
wakan...5o 1s, the “sun: iy) eee)’, It 4s a propertysen 
mystic quality inherent in things that is meant. And the 
Indian adds: ‘‘ When it is night, there are ghosts and many 
fearful objects, so they regard the night as wakan. . . 3 
A yet earlier investigator, quoted by Dorsey, had already 


remarked: ‘‘ No one term can express the full meaning of 
the Dacota’s wakan. It comprehends all mystery, secret 
power and divinity. . . . All life is wakan. So also is every- 


thing which exhibits power, whether in action, as the winds 
and drifting clouds, or in passive endurance, as the boulder 
by the wayside. . . . It covers the whole field of fear and 


1 “ The Signification of the Scalp-lock,” J.A.I., xxvii. p. 437. 
* Dorsey, “ Siouan Cults,” £. B. Rept., xi. p. 494. 3 Ibid., p. 467. 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 133 


worship; but many things that are neither feared nor wor- 
shipped, but are simply wonderful, come under this 
designation.”’ ! 

We may be inclined to ask, what, then, is not wakan? 
Such a question would in fact be urged by logical thought 
which demands the strict definition of its concepts, and a 
rigorously determined connotation and extent. But pre- 
logical reasoning does not feel the need of this, especially when 
dealing with collective representations which are both con- 
crete and very general. Wakan is something of a mystic 
nature in which any object whatever may or may not partici- 
pate, according to circumstances. ‘‘ Man himself may become 
mysterious by fasting, prayer and vision.’’2 A human being 
is not necessarily wakan or not wakan, therefore, and one of 
the duties of the medicine-man in this matter is to avoid errors 
which might have fatal results. Wakan might be compared 
with a fluid which courses through all existing things, and is 
the mystic principle of the life and virtue of all beings. “A 
young man’s weapons are wakan: they must not be touched 
by a woman. They contain divine power. . . . A man prays 
to his weapons on the day of battle.” 

If the observer recording these facts interprets them at the 
same time (as usually happens), and if he has not noted the 
difference between prelogical reasoning and logical thinking, 
he will be led direct to anthromorphic animism. Here, for 
instance, is what Charlevoix tells us about the same North 
American Indians: ‘‘ If one is to believe the savages, there 
is nothing in nature which has not a corresponding spirit : but 
there are varying orders of spirits, and all have not the same 
power. When they fail to understand a thing, they attribute 
supreme virtue to it, and they then account for it by saying 
‘it is a spirit.’’’3 That means that this thing is “‘ wakan”’ ; 
just as the Yaos say “it is mulungu !” 

Although Spencer and Gillen uphold the animistic theory, 
they are too keen observers not to have themselves noticed 
how very puzzling these collective representations are to our 
logical thinking. They remarked that certain words are some- 


t Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,” E. B. Rept., xi. pp. 432-3. : 
2 [bid., p. 365. 
3 Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l Amérique Septentrionale, iii. p. 346. 


134 HOW NATIVES THINK 


times used as substantives, and then again as adjectives. For 
instance, arungquiltha to the Aruntas is “a supernatural evil 
power.” ‘A thin ostrich or emu is either avungquiltha or is 
endowed with arungquiltha. The name is applied indiscrimin- 
ately either to the evil influence or to the object in which 
it is, for the time being, or permanently, resident.” 1 Else- 
where, Spencer and Gillen state that avungquiltha is sometimes 
personal and sometimes impersonal. ‘They believe that 
eclipses are caused by the periodic visits of the arungquiltha, 
who would like to take up his abode in the sun, permanently 
obliterating its light, and that the evil spirit is only dragged 
out by the medicine-men.’”’? Even the churinga, which these 
aborigines regard as a sacred, living being and, according to 
some observations made, as the body of a personal ancestor, 
is on other occasions considered to be a mystic property 
inherent in things. ‘‘ Churinga,’ say Spencer and Gillen 
explicitly, “is used either as a substantive, when it implies 
a sacred emblem, or as a qualifying term, when it implies | 
sacred or secret.” 3 

In the Torres Straits, also, ‘‘ when anything behaved in a 
remarkable or mysterious manner it could be regarded as a 
zogo . . . rain, wind, a concrete object or a shrine can be 
a zogo; a zogo can be impersonal or personal ; it belonged in 
a general way to particular groups of natives, but it was a 
particular property of certain individuals, the zogo le, who alone 
knew all the ceremonies connected with it, because the rites 
were confined to them. . . . I do not know how the term 
can be better translated than by the word ‘sacred.’ The 
term zogo is usually employed as a noun, even when it might 
be expected to be an adjective.”’ 4 

Hubert and Mauss, in their acute analysis of the idea of 
the mana of the Melanesians, described by Codrington, and 
also that of the Huron orenda, have clearly brought out their 
relation to the idea of wakan.5 What we have just said about 
the latter applies equally to these and to other similar con- 


t The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 548 (note). 

2 Ibid., p. 566. Cf. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 629. 

3 Ibid., p. 139 (note). 

4 The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vi. pp. 244-5. 

5 Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie, Année Sociologique, vii. 
pp. 108 et. seq. (1904). 


FUNCTIONING OF PRELOGICAL MENTALITY 135 


ceptions of which it would be an easy matter to find examples 
elsewhere, also interpreted as animistic. Such an idea is that 
of wong, which we find in West Africa. “The Guinea Coast 
negro’s generic name for a fetish-spirit is wong; these 
aerial beings dwell in temple-huts and consume sacrifices, enter 
into and inspire their priests, cause health and sickness among 
men, and execute the behests of the mighty Heaven-god. 
But part or all of them are connected with material objects 
and a native can say ‘ In this river, or tree or amulet, there is 
a wong.’ ... Thus among the wongs of the land are rivers, 
lakes and springs ; districts of land, termite-hills, trees, croco- 
diles, apes, snakes, elephants, and birds.’’? It is from a mis- 
sionary’s report that Tylor has borrowed this account, and it 
is by no means difficult to find in it, not only “ the three 
stages of animistic belief’? which Hetherwick noticed in the 
Yaos, but also a collective representation entirely similar to 
wakan, mana, orenda, and many others. 

Collective representations of such a nature are to be found, 
more or less clearly indicated, in nearly all the primitive 
peoples who have been studied at all closely. They dominate, 
as Hubert and Mauss have well demonstrated, their religious 
beliefs and magic practices. It is possibly through them that 
the difference between prelogical mentality and logical thought 
can be best defined. When face to face with such repre- 
sentations the latter is always dubious. Are they realities 
which exist per se, or merely very general predicates? Are 
we dealing with one single and universal subject, with a kind 
of world-soul or spirit, or with a multiplicity of souls, spirits, 
divinities? Or again, do these representations imply, as 
many missionaries have believed, both a supreme divinity 
and an infinite number of lesser powers? It is the nature of 
logical thought to demand a reply to questions such as these. 
It cannot admit at one and the same time of alternatives which 
seem to be mutually exclusive. The nature of prelogical 
mentality, on the contrary, is to ignore the necessity. Essen- 
tially mystic as it is, it finds no difficulty in imagining, as well 
as feeling, the identity of the one and the many, the individual 
and the species, of entities however unlike they be, by means of 

t Tylor, Primitive Culture (4th edit), i. p. 205. 


136 HOW NATIVES THINK 


participation. In this liesits guiding principle ; this it is which 
accounts for the kind of abstraction and generalization peculiar 
to such a mentality, and to this, again, we must mainly refer 
the characteristic forms of activity we find in primitive 
peoples. 


—- test 


BA RSS 


+ Wi 





CHAPTER IV 


THE MENTALITY OF PRIMITIVES IN RELATION TO 
THE LANGUAGES THEY SPEAK 


THE essential characteristics of the mentality of a given 
social group should, it seems to me, be reflected to some extent 
in the language its members speak. In the long run the 
mental habits of the group cannot fail to leave some trace 
upon their modes of expression, since these are also social 
phenomena, upon which the individual has little, if any, in- 
fluence. With differing types of mentality, therefore, there 
should be languages which differ in their construction. We 
could not venture very far upon the strength of so general 
a principle, however. In the first place, we do not know 
whether even in primitive peoples there is a single one who 
speaks his own language—that is, a language which exactly 
corresponds, according to the hypothesis suggested above, 
with the type of mind which his group ideas express. On the 
contrary it is probable that by reason of migration, inter- 
mingling and absorption of groups we shall nowhere encounter 
the conditions which such a hypothesis implies. Even in 
the period known to history a social group very often adopts 
the language of another group which has conquered it, 
or been conquered by it. We can therefore safely establish 
nothing more than a very general correspondence between 
the characteristics of the languages and those of the mentality 
of the social groups, confining ourselves exclusively to such 
characteristics as are to be found in the language and the 
mentality of all the groups of a certain kind. 

In the second place, the languages of primitive peoples 
are still very little known. Of very many of them we possess 
no more than very imperfect vocabularies. They may perhaps 
allow of our placing them, provisionally, in a certain linguistic 


140 HOW NATIVES THINK 


family, but they are wholly insufficient for the purpose of 
comparative study, and in the opinion of those best qualified 
to judge, a comparative grammar of the different families of 
spoken languages would be an impossible achievement. 

Lastly, the construction of the languages spoken by 
primitive peoples conveys both that which is peculiar to their 
own mental habits and that which they have in common 
with ourselves. We have already found that prelogical does 
not mean antilogical. We cannot lay down a principle that 
these languages must have special grammars differing specifically 
from our own. We are compelled, therefore, to leave these 
too vast problems untouched, and discover by some more 
modest method how far an examination of their languages 
may confirm what I have already said about the mentality of 
primitives. Leaving grammar, properly so called, out of the 
question, I shall primarily search for what may be revealed 
of the mind of such peoples in the construction of their 
sentences and in their vocabulary, and I shall choose "my 
examples preferably from the languages of the North American 
Indians, which have been specially studied by those who 
collaborate in the Washington Bureau of Ethnography. 
This does not, however, preclude me from quoting, for the 
purpose of comparison, from other tongues which may belong 
to quite different language groups. 


I 


Perhaps the most salient characteristic of most of the 
languages of the North American Indians is the care they 
take to express concrete details which our languages leave 
understood or unexpressed. ‘A Ponka Indian in saying 
that a man killed a rabbit, would have to say: the man, he, 
one, animate, standing (in the nominative case), purposely killed 
by shooting an arrow the rabbit, he, the one, animal, sitting 
(in the objective case) ; for the form of a verb to kill would 
have to be selected, and the verb changes its form by inflection 
or incorporated particles to denote person, number, and gender 
(as animate or inanimate) and gender again as sitting or lying, 
and case. The form of the verb would also express whether 
the killing was done accidentally or purposely, and whether 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 141 


it was by shooting . . . and if by shooting, whether by bow 
and arrow, or by gun.”! So too, in the Cherokee tongue, 
“‘instead of the vague expression we, there are distinct 
modifications meaning I and thou, I and ye, I and ye two, 
I and he, I and they, etc., and in the plural I, thou, and he or 
they, I, ye, and he and they, etc., etc. In the simple conjuga- 
tion of the present of the indicative, including the pronouns 
in the nominative and oblique cases, there are not less than 
seventy distinct forms. ... Other nice distinctions; the 
various forms of the verb denote whether the object be animate 
or inanimate, whether or not the person spoken of, either as 
agent or object, is expected to hear what is said, and in regard 
to the dual and plural numbers, whether the action terminates 
upon the several objects collectively, as if it were one object, 
or upon each object considered separately, etc.” 2 

These languages, therefore, like our own, recognize a 
number category, but they do not express it in the same way. 
We oppose the singular to the plural: a subject or object 
is either singular or plural, and this mental habit involves 
a rapid and familiar use of abstraction, that is, of logical 
thought and the matter it deals with. Prelogical mentality 
does not proceed thus, however. ‘To the observing mind 
of the Klamath Indian,” says Gatschet in his excellent 
Klamath grammar, “the fact that things were done re- 
peatedly, at different times, or that the same thing was 
done severally by distinct persons, appeared much more 
important than the pure idea of plurality, as we have it in 
our language.’’3 Klamath has no plural form, but it makes 
use of a distributive reduplication, and every time that this 
form indicates plurality, it is merely because this idea of 
distributive reduplication happens to coincide with the idea 
of plurality. 

“ Thus nep means hands as well as hand, the hand, a hand, 
but its distributive form nénap means each of the two hands 
or the hands of each person when considered as a separate 
individual. Kitcho’l means star, the stars, constellation or 
constellations ; kichdéktchd] means each star or every star 


t Powell, ‘‘ The Evolution of Language,” E. B. Rept., i. p. 16. 
2 Gallatin, Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, ii. pp. 130-1. 
3 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 419. 


142 HOW NATIVES THINK 


or constellation considered separately. Pddshat means you 
became blind of one eye; papddsha i, you are totally blind, 
you lost the use of each of your eyes.”’ ! 

Does this mean that the Klamath language cannot express 
a plural? By no means; but it does so in varied forms. 
“The plural number of the subject of the sentence may be 
indicated in different ways: (1) analytically by adding to 
the noun a numeral or an indefinite pronoun (a few, some, 
all, many, etc.); (2) by the noun being collective, or one of 
the substantives designating persons, which possess a form 
for the real plural; (3) the large majority of substantives 
having no real plural, their plurality is indicated in the intran- 
sitive verbs by the distributive form, and in a few transitive 
verbs by a special form which has also a distributive function ; 
(4) the dual form serves for two, three, or four subjects of 
certain intransitive verbs.” 2 

To judge from these examples, which are by no means 
exceptional, if prelogical mentality primarily makes no use 
of the plural form it is because such a form is not sufficiently — 
explicit, and does not specify the particular modality of the 
plural. The primitive’s mentality needs to differentiate 
between two, three, a few, or many subjects or objects, to 
indicate whether they are together or separate. As we shall 
see later, it has no general terms for ‘“ tree ”” or “‘ fish’’ but 
special terms for every variety of tree or of fish. It will 
therefore have methods of rendering, not the pure and simple 
plural, but the varying kinds of plural. As a general rule 
we shall find this peculiarity the more marked when we are 
considering languages spoken by the social groups in which 
prelogical mentality is still dominant. 

In fact, in the Australian dialects, in those of the New 
Hebrides and Melanesia, and in those of New Guinea, we 
find used, sometimes as well as the plural form properly so 
called, sometimes without it, the dual, trial, and even what 
we might term the quadrial forms. Thus in the Papuan 
language of the island of Kiwai, ‘“‘ nouns are often used with- 
out any mark of number; but when the noun is the subject 
of a verb, it is usual to distinguish number by means of a 
suffix, The singular is shown by the suffix vo, the dual by 

A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, pp. 262-3. 2 Ibid., pp. 578-9. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 143 


the word toribo, the trial by the word potoro. The plural is 
shown by the word sivio preceding, or by the word sirioro 
following. The singular suffix vo is very commonly omitted. 
Potoro is used also for four, and its real meaning is therefore 
probably ‘a few.” The vo suffixed in potoro and sirioro 
is probably the same as the singular 70, and suggests 
that potorois a set of three, a triad, and sirioro a lot, a 
number.” ! 

In this same language we find a multiplicity of verbal 
suffixes, simple and compound, the function of which is to 
specify how many subjects act upon how many objects at 
a given moment. Here are examples of suffixes : 


yudo means the action of two on many in past time. 

yumo means the action of many on many in the past. 
durudo, the action of two on many in present time. 
duyumo, the action of many on many in the present. 
amadurodo, the action of two on two in present time. 
amarudo, similar action in past time. 

amarumo, the action of many on two in past time. 
ibidurudo, the action of many on three in present time. 
ibidurumo, similar action in past time. 

amabidurumo, action of three on two in present time, etc.? 


To my mind the desire for concrete specification could 
scarcely be expressed more clearly, as far as number is con- 
cerned. Therefore we may say that these languages 
possess a whole system of plurals. “The dual number, 
and what is called the trial, are in Melanesian languages, 
with the exception of a very few words, really no distinct 
number, but the plural with a numeral attached.”3 This 
remark of Codrington’s applies exactly to the languages of 
British New Guinea. It amounts to saying that these 
languages express as fully as possible a plural which is deter- 
minate in number, and not simply a plural. 

The same phenomenon occurs frequently in the Australian 
languages. Thus, ‘‘in all the dialects having the Tyattyalla 
structure, there are four numbers, the singular, dual, trial, and 
plural. The trial has also forms in the first person (inclusive 


1 The Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits, iii. p. 306. 

2 Codrington, Melanesian Languages, p. 111, quoted in The Cambridge 
pose to Torres Straits, iii. p. 428. 

3 Ibid. ' 


144 HOW NATIVES THINK 


and exclusive). The trial has also been found by me in the 
Thaguwurru and Woiwurru tongues. . . . The existence of 
trial was reported years ago in Aneityum and some other 
islands in the Pacific Ocean, and was observed to some extent 
in the pronouns of the Woddouro tribe in Victoria by Mr. 
Tuckfield.”’ 1 ‘‘ Although the dual is generally used, a trial 
is often met with in the Bureba language (Murray River).”’ 2 
‘The trial number, as existing in the native languages of 
Victoria, is different in character from that observed in some 
other countries. For example, in the New Hebrides, the 
case endings of the dual, trial and plural are independent 
and differ from each other in form. ... But among the 
Victorian tribes, the trial number is formed by adding another 
case-ending to that of the plural.’’3 In the Motu language 
of New Guinea, W. G. Lawes, the missionary, reports that 
the dual and the trial of pronouns is formed by additions 
to the plural. This is the fact which Codrington had noted. 

In New Mecklenburg, in the Bismark Archipelago, forms 
of quadrial (Vierzahl) over and above the trial, had been ~ 
encountered. These quadrial forms are to be found also in 
Nggao (Solomon Isles) and at Araga and Tanna, in the New 
Hebrides. They are the counterpart of the Polynesian 
‘plurals,’’ which in reality are trials.4 

The diversity of these forms does not prevent our 
recognizing a common tendency in all. Sometimes we have 
the dual and trial as independent forms, co-existing with 
the plural, properly so called, in the New Hebrides ; sometimes 
there are plurals completed by a suffix which specifies a 
number, as in the languages of Melanesia and New Guinea, 
and some Australian tongues. Occasionally the distributive 
reduplication is prior to the plural proper and supplies its 
place; or again, the plural seems to be wanting, and there 
are various ways of providing for it. For example, “ In 
Déné-dindjié there is no plural, and the idea of it is expressed 
by the addition of the word ‘many’ to the singular... . 
The Peaux de liévre and the Loucheux make use of the dual 

1 Mathews, ‘“‘ The Aboriginal Languages of Victoria,’’ Journal of the 
nine aeaied ed South Wales, pp. 72-3 (1903). 


3 Id., ‘ Languages of the Kamitaroi,” /.4.1., xxxiii. pp. 282-3. 
4 P. W. Schmidt, Anthropos, ii. p. 905 (1907). 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 145 


element and this form indiscriminately.” 1 Occasionally, too, 
there is variety in the formation of the plural. Thus, in the 
Abipone language, ‘the formation of the plural number of 
nouns is very difficult to beginners, for it is so various that 
hardly any rule can be set down. . . . Moreover, the Abipones 
have {wo plurals: more than one, and many. Joalez, some 
men; Joalivipi, many men.”? This differentiation is a 
familiar one in Semitic languages also. We see in them the 
various methods (the list of which we have not exhausted) 
by which languages express the various modalities of numera- 
tion. \Instead of indicating plurality in general, they specify 
what sort of plurality is intended: of two things together, 
or of three. Beyond three, a good many languages say 
“many.” This is doubtless why we find no special forms 
for the plural, beyond the dual and the trial, in the tongues 
of the most primitive peoples we know of. Little by little, 
as the mental functioning is modified and representations 
necessarily become less concrete, there is a tendency to reduce 
plural forms to the simple plural. We lose the trial form 
first of all, and then the dual. Junod notes an isolated 
survival of the dual form in the Ronga language.3 The 
history of Greek demonstrates a continuous decay of the dual 
form which is significant.4 


II 


It is not in the number category alone that the need 
for concrete expression manifests itself in the languages 
of primitives. There is at least the same wealth of forms | 
which endeavour to render the varied modality of action | 
denoted by a verb. For instance, in the language of the 
Ngeumba tribe of the Darling River, New South Wales, in the 
past and future tenses, terminations vary to indicate whether 
the action described occurred in the immediate, recent, or 
remote past, or will take place at once or in the near or remote 
future; whether there has been, or will be, repetition or 
continuity of action; and yet other modifications of verbal 
suffixes. These terminations are the same for all the persons in 


1 Petitot, Dictionnaire de la Langue Dènè-dindjié, p. li. 
2 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, il. p. 163. 
3 Junod, Grammaire Ronga, P. 135. 

4 Cuny, Le Duel en Grec, pp. 506-8. 


IO 


146 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the singular, dual, and plural. Therefore there are different 


forms to express— 
I shall beat (indefinite). 
I shall beat in the morning. 
I shall beat all day. 
I shall beat in the evening. 
I shall beat in the night. 
I shall beat again, etc. 


In the Kafir tongue, with the help of auxiliary verbs, we can 
obtain six or seven imperative forms, all with differing meanings: 
1. Ma unyuke e ntabeni—Stand up to go up the hill. 
2. Ka unyuke e ntabeni—Make one move to go up the hill. 
3. Suka u nyuke ntabeni—Wake up to go up the hill. 
4. Hamb’o kunyuka—Walk up to go up. 
5. Uz’ unyuke e niabeni—Come to go up the hill, etc., etc. 

Though all the above expressions may be rendered by 
‘go up the hill,” yet properly form (1) supposes a change 
of occupation, (2) may be used only of a momentary action ; 
(3) will best be said to one who is too slow to perform an order, - 
(4) to one who has to go some way before beginning to go up 
the hill, and (5) conveys an order or prayer which allows delay 
in the execution, etc., etc.? 

The extraordinary prolixity of the verbal forms in the 
languages of the North American Indians is well known, 
and in those known as Indo-European it seems to have been 
no less. In the Abipone language it creates, as Dobrizhoffer 
says, ‘‘a labyrinth most formidable.’’3 In Northern Asia, 
“the Aléutian verb, according to Venianimof, can take more 
than four hundred endings, to indicate mood, tense, and 
person, without reckoning the tenses which may be formed 
with the help of auxiliaries. It is clear that originally each 
of these many forms corresponded with a definite shade of 
meaning, and that the Aléutian of former days, like the 
Turkish language of our times, was marvellously versatile in 
responding to the very minutest verbal modality.” 4 


t Mathews, “‘ Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria,’”’ Journal 
of the Royal Society of New South Wales, pp. 220-4 (1905). Cf. ibid., pp. 142, 
151, 166 (1903). 

2 Torrend, Comparative Grammar of the South African Bantu Languages, 


23% 
3 Dobrizhoffer, op. cit., ii. pp. 172-80. 
« V. Henry, Esquisse d'une Grammaire Raisonnée de la Langue Aléoute,” 


PP. 34-5- 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 147 


If the need for concrete expression and the accumulation 
of forms capable of expressing any peculiarities of action, 
or subject and object, are indeed features common to very 
many of the languages spoken by primitive peoples ; if these 
features tend to grow weaker or to disappear as communities 
advance in development, it is permissible to inquire what 
it is with which they correspond in that which we have called 
the mentality peculiar to these peoples. It is a mentality 
which makes little use of abstraction, and even that in a 
different method from a mind under the sway of logical 
thought ; it has not the same concepts at command. Will 
it be possible to go yet a little further and find, in examining 
the matter at its disposal—that is, the vocabulary of its 
languages—any positive indications of the manner of its 
functioning ? 

The Klamath language, which may be taken to represent 
a very numerous family of languages in North America, 
obeys a well-marked tendency which Gatschet calls “ pictorial,” 
a tendency to delineate that which one desires to express. 
‘A motion performed in a straight line is referred to difi- 
erently from a motion performed sidewise or obliquely or 
at a distance from the one speaking, circumstances which 
it would seldon occur to us to express in European 
languages.’’t It is above all in its primitive form that the 
Klamath language displays this characteristic. At that time 
“it seems to have left unnoticed the expression of number 
in verbs, as well as in nouns and found no more necessity to 
define it than to define sex. Only a little more attention was 
paid to the categories of mode and tense, for what was done 
in all these belongs to later periods of linguistic development. 
Concrete categories alone were then accounted of importance ; 
for all relations bearing upon locality, distance, and indivi- 
duality or severalty are distinguished with superior accuracy, 
and even tense is marked by means of particles which were 
originally locomotive.” 2 

In short, it is especially spatial relations, all that can be 
retained and reproduced by visual and muscular memory, 
that the Klamath language aims at expressing, and this the 
more exclusively in the most remote period of its history. 

1 A, Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 460. 2 Ibid., pp. 433-4. 


148 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Like nearly all the languages of primitive peoples, it has 
no verb ‘to be.” ‘“ The verb gz which takes the place of 
it is, in fact, the demonstrative pronoun ge, ke (this one, this 
here), in a verbified shape, and having assumed the verbal 
form, it came to signify to be here, to be at this or that place, 
to be at this time or at such a time.’’! In a general way, 
that which relates to time is expressed by words which were 
first of all applied to spatial relations. “In Klamath, as 
in many other languages, there are only two tense-forms, 
one for the completed and the other for the incompleted act or 
state ...and... both forms, whether appearing in the 
verb or in some substantives, originally had a locative 
character, now pointing to distance in time only.” 2 

The spatial element predominates in the same way where 
case is concerned. Setting aside the “‘three purely gram- 
matical cases (subjective, direct objective, and possessive), 
all the other cases, as instrumental, inessive, adessive, etc., 
are either locative, or take their origin in some locative relation 
of the noun to the verb.’’3 Even the possessive was origin- 
ally locative, and the partitive also, which “is but another 
form of the prefix ¢a, and originally both referred to objects 
standing erect, as men, animals, trees, etc., the suffixed 7 
pointing to location on, upon something.’’4 It is the same 
with the inessive. ‘‘ As the first of the five post-position 
cases, I have placed the one formed of the pronominal element 
i, hi. . . . It occurs in nominal inflection as a case-terminal 
by itself, and also enters the composition of several others, 
as ti, xént, émi, kshi, ksaki . . . From its primary signification 
upon the ground, have developed those of within, at home, 
in the lodge, for one’s or another’s benefit or disadvantage, and 
the temporal one when, at the time when.” 5 Finally as to 
the directive case: ‘‘ this case post-position is a combination 
of the two pronominal elements #4 and la, which we find to 
be the components of a large number of affixes. It is most 
generally connected with verbs of motion, and corresponds 
with our to, toward. . . . It is connected with the names 
of the cardinal points of the horizon, and . . . the original 


1 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, pp. 430-1. 
2 Ibid., p. 402. 3 Ibid., p. 467. 
4 Ibid., p. 476; 5 Ibid., p. 485. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 149 


use made of this particle seems to have been that of 
pointing to objects visible at long distances.” * We must 
refer to Gatschet’s work for ‘‘ a long series of locative case- 
endings.”’ 2 

If we pass on to the demonstrative pronouns we shall find 
that there, too, we have a great many spatial pecularities 
most minutely expressed. Klamath is not content with 
distinguishing #his from that ; it distinguishes, both in animate 
and inanimate kind : 


this (so near as to be touched) 
this (close by, right here) 

this (standing, being before you) 
this (present, visible, within sight) 


that visible (though distant) 
that absent 

that absent (departed) 

that (beyond sight) 


All these forms are in use both for the subjective and the 
objective case,3 and this is not, as we know, a peculiarity of 
the Klamath tongue. In most primitive languages, personal 
and demonstrative pronouns exhibit a large number of different 
forms, in order to express the relations of distance, relative 
position, visibility, presence or absence, between subject and 
object, etc. To quote but one or two examples taken from 
the languages of wholly undeveloped peoples, in the Wongai- 
bon tongue demonstrative pronouns are both numerous and 
varied, and represent divers grades of meaning which depend 
upon the position of the object with regard to the speaker 
as well as with regard to cardinal points. It is the same, too, 
with the Dyirrigan and Yota-yota languages.4 In the case 
of the Yahgans, pronouns are very numerous... . they have, 
the three numbers, and are declined like nouns. The Yahgans, 
when making use of pronouns, always indicate the position 
of the person spoken of. ... For instance, they speak of 
him or her in relation to an object at the upper end of the 

: A. Gatsch et, The Klamath Language, p. 489. 

2 Ibid., pp. 479 et seq. 3 Ibid., pp. 538 et. seq. 

_ 4 Mathews, “ Languages of . . . Queensland, New South Wales and 


Victoria,” Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, pp. 151, 163, 
170 (1903). 


150 HOW NATIVES THINK 


wigwam, or facing the door, or to a person at the bottom of 
a creek or a valley—at the left or right of the wigwam or in 
its interior—in the wigwam, near the threshold—outside the 
house. All these pronouns are of three classes, according 
to whether they refer to the position of the person who is 
speaking, the person spoken to, or the one spoken of. . . . It 
is the same with the demonstrative pronouns.! 

The post-positions in Klamath are exceptionally numerous, 
and nearly all express spatial relations. ‘‘ Those of our 
prepositions which are of an abstract nature, as about, on 
behalf of, for, concerning, etc., are expressed by inflectional 
suffixes, appended to the verb or noun, and all the post- 
positions we meet are of a concrete, locative signification. 
Even the few temporal post-positions are locative at the 
same time.’’2 In Gatschet’s book the reader will find a list 
of the “‘ principal ”” of these, forty-three in number. 

“Temporal adverbs have all evolved from locative 
adverbs, and hence often retain both significations. ... 
Adverbs of space are very numerous and multiform, almost 
all the pronominal radices having contributed to the list.’ 3 
Gatschet enumerates fifty-four of these which, he says, are 
the most frequently met with. There are special ways of 
expressing ‘close by,’ “in front,” ‘‘here at the side,” etc. 

Without unduly prolonging the list of proofs, which it 
would be quite easy to multiply, we may therefore regard 
as established the conclusion formulated by Gatschet in the 
following terms. ‘‘ The concrete categories of position, loca- 
tion and distance are of such paramount importance to the 
conception of rude nations as are to us those of time and 
causality.’’4 Every sentence in which concrete beings or 
objects are in question (and in such languages there are 
scarcely any others) must accordingly express their spatial 
relation. This essential point may be compared with the 
necessity of giving every noun in our language a gender. 
“The student” (of language) says Powell, ‘‘ must entirely 
free his mind from the idea that gender is simply a distinction 
of sex. In Indian tongues ” (possibly, too, in Bantu and 


1 T. Bridges, ‘ A few Notes on the Structure of the Yahgan,” J.4.1., 
XXlii. pp. 53-80. 

2 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, pp. 554 et seq. 

3 Ibid., pp. 562 et seq., 583. 4 Ibid., p. 306. 


| PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 151 


in Indo-European languages), “‘ genders are usually methods 
of classification primarily into animate and inanimate. The 
animate may again be divided into male and female, but 
this is rarely the case. Often by these genders all objects 
are classified by characteristics found in their attitude or 
supposed constitution. Thus we may have the animate and 
inanimate, one or both, divided into the standing, sitting, lying 
... or... into the watery, mushy, earthy, stony, woody, 
fleshy.”’ * 

In Klamath, for instance, ‘‘ whenever an animate or inani- 
mate subject or object is referred to as being somewhere, either 
indoor or outdoor, around, below, between, or above somebody 
or something, in the water or on the ground, the verb gz, to 
be, is not employed, but the adverbial idea becomes verbified 
in the form of some intransitive verb, so that below, e.g. 
becomes 7-utila, to be or lie below, underneath. The mode 
of existence has also to be distinctly qualified in that verbi- 
fied term; it has to be stated whether the object or subject 
was standing, sitting or lying, staying, living, sleeping. 
Usually the idea of staying and living coincides with that of 
sitting, and sleeping with that of lying on a certain spot.”’ 2 
In other languages, modifications of the pronouns satisfy 
this demand. With the Abipones, for example, if the object 
of discourse is— 


MASCULINE. FEMININE; 
present, it is designated by eneha anaha 
if it be seated it is designated by hiniha haniha 
if it be lying it is designated by hiriha hariha 
if it be standing it is designated by haraha haraha 
if walking and visible it is designated by ehaha ahaha 
if walking and invisible it is designated by ekaha akaha 


If the object alone is— 


seated itis designated by ynitara 
lying it is designated by iritara 
walking it is designated by ekatara 
absent it is designated by okatara 
standing it is designated by eratara 3 


t Powell, ‘ The Evolution of Language,” E. B. Rept., i. pp. 9-10. 
2 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, pp. 674-5. 
3 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, ii. p. 166. 


152 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Since facts like these are ascertainable in nearly all the 
languages of primitive peoples actually known to us, we may 
regard the necessity to which they bear witness as an essential 
element of primitive mentality. 


Ill 


But primitive mentality does not demand alone that 
the relative positions of things and persons in space, as well 
as their distance from each other, be expressed. It is not 
satisfied unless the language expressly specifies besides, the 
details regarding the form of objects, their dimensions ; way 
of moving about in the various circumstances in which they 
may be placed; and to accomplish this, the most divers 
forms are employed. The Klamath language, which will 
serve as a type once more, mainly has recourse to affixes, of 
which it possesses a surprising number. A few examples only 
will suffice to show the extent to which this meticulousness 
is prosecuted. I shall consider prefixes first. 


(1) Prefixes indicating form and dimensions. 

a, a verb and noun prefix, denoting long, high objects, 
such as poles, sticks, and also human beings when their stature 
is being considered. It differs from ég, tk, which are no longer 
met with save as part of a root syllable denoting the immobility 
of a subject placed upright, in that it denotes long objects 
which are not necessarily in an upright position. For instance: 

aggédsha—to describe a circle (the hand of a watch). 
ahkätchga—to break (poles and sticks). 
alahia—to show (a tree). 
The prefix a is seen also in the initial syllable az or ei, when 
referring to a movement made with the head, as aka, to 
move the head forward. 


(2) Prefixes denoting a special method of dealing with definite 
objects. 
dy, y, prefixes of transitive verbs and their derivatives, 
indicating an action performed with or upon a number of 
elongated persons or objects, or upon objects considered 
collectively, when not standing in an invariable upright 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 153 


position. If there be but one object, the prefixes are 4, e, 
ksh, u. . . . For example: 


idsah—to cause to move, or carry away (a single object, éna). 
itpa—to fetch away, to remove (a single object, dtpa). 


(3) Prefixes denoting movement in a certain direction, 

hi, ke, ge, k, g, prefixes of transitive and intransitive verbs 
and their derivatives, to indicate an action accomplished 
obliquely, from the side, or a lateral movement towards an 
object. 


kidpka—to lie down across (ipka, to be lying). 
kimdédsh—an ant (anything which walks or moves sideways). 


Km is a prefix formed from the combination of the prefix 4 
(shortened form of ki) and ma (abbreviated to m), the latter 
indicating a curvilinear movement or object, km accordingly 
denotes a lateral or curvilinear movement, or the turning 
movement of an object, like a cord, thread, or wrinkle. 


kmukdligi—to wrinkle (as the effect of moisture). 


(4) Prefixes denoting form and movement. 

1, prefixed to verbs and nouns which describe or indicate 
the outside of a round or spheroidal, cylindrical, discoid 
or bulbed object, or a ring; also voluminous; or again, 
an act accomplished with an object which bears such a form ; 
or a circular or semi-circular or waving movement of the 
body, arms, hands, or other parts. Therefore this prefix is 
to be found connected with clouds, celestial bodies, rounded 
slopes on the earth’s surface, fruits rounded or bulbed in 
shape, stones and dwellings (these last being usually circular 
in form). It is employed, too, for a crowd of animals, for 
enclosures, social gatherings (since an assembly usually FOOD 
the form of a circle), and so forth. 


(5) Prefix denoting a movement in a definite medium. 

ich, ts, a prefix which appears in terms exclusively denoting 
the movements observed in water and other liquids, the 
floating of objects on or in water, the flow or movement of 
liquids themselves. 


tchéwa—to float (from éwa, used of water-birds). 
ichla’lya—to sink (from é/ya). 


Hen HOW NATIVES THINK 


(6) A compound prefix indicating a certain movement or form. 

shl, a prefix compounded of the prefixes sk and J, and 
indicating, in nouns, as in verbs (almost invariably transitive) 
objects of a slender, flexible shape, of the nature of leaves, 
such as linen, cloaks, hats, other articles of clothing or things 
in which one may be wrapped, and also other objects which 


may have folded surfaces; even baskets, because they are 
flexible. 


Shlaniya—to stretch (a skin, for instance). 
Shla-ish—a mat. 


Shläpa—to open, be in flower. 
Shlapsh—bud. 


In summing up, Gatschet gives a recapitulation of the 
Klamath language-prefixes, which the question of space 
forbids me to quote. I shall indicate the most important at 
least, in order that a glance at the various functions of the 
prefixes may enable us to see the predominance of the function 


which serves to specify spatial relations, forms, and methods 
of moving and acting. 


A. Prefixes relating to verbs, auxiliary, reflective, causative, 
transitive, and intransitive, etc. 

B. Prefixes relating to number : singular, plural. 

C. Prefixes relating to the form and contour of subject or 
object: (1) forms which are round or spherical or large; (2) 
flat, smooth, flexible, like threads ; (3) forms like leaves, and 
like coverings for the body ; (4) long, elongated, and tall forms. 

D. Prefixes relating to the attitude and position ; as upright, 
straight, rigid. 

E. Prefixes relating to movement, (x) in the air; (2) below; 
(3) outside, in or on water and other liquids; (4) performed 
by an oblique movement; (5) in a zigzag on the ground ; 
(6) in the form of a wave; (7) with the head; (8) with the 
hands or arms ; (9) with the back or feet. 


F. Prefixes referring to relations expressed by adverbs ; 
i.e. locative prefixes.! 


The number of suffixes, and the variety of their functions, 
is far greater even than those which our study of prefixes 


t A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, PP. 302-3. 


> 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE rs 


has made manifest. I shall not enter into detail about the 
relations they express. I shall merely note that they serve 
to reproduce, among others, the following ideas: to begin, 
continue, cease, return to, to be accustomed to do, either 
frequently or at the beginning, to pass to, to move to a longer 
or shorter distance, to move in a zigzag or in a straight line, 
to go up, along the ground, or below, to describe circles in 
the air, to come towards or go away from (the subject or 
object being either visible or invisible), to change one’s place 
in the hut or outside it, on the water or below its surface, 
and finally an infinity of other details, many of which would 
be neither observed nor expressed by us, but which strike 
the Indian mind more forcibly than they would our own.? 

Gatschet notes that prefixes refer rather to the category 
of form, while suffixes preferably relate to those of the way 
of acting, movement, and repose. But it is not always easy 
to maintain this difference, as we shall see from the following 
list of suffixes, a list which is much abridged, only the headings 
of which I reproduce here. 

À. Suffixes describing movement: (1) in a straight line, or 
for a short distance; (2) towards the ground; (3) towards 
some other object, or towards the subject of the verb; 
(4) far away, to separate; (5) above or below something ; 
(6) on a horizontal plane; (7) circular (whether inside or 
outside the house) ; (8) around an object; (9) turning or 
winding ; (10) vibratory or oscillating; (11) down; (12) in 
the water. 

B. Suffixes to denote staying, or remaining at rest: (x) in 
the interior of the hut or some other enclosed space; (2) out- 
side, beyond certain limits; (3) on, above, or on the surface 
of; (4) around, encompassing something ; (5) below, beneath ; 
(6) between; (7) at a distance from; (8) in the woods or 
marshes or on the cliffs; (9) in the water; (10) around and 
near the water. 

C. Suffixes descriptive of acts accomplished by living beings 
or by parts of their bodies: (1) frequentative; (2) iterative ; 
(3) habitual; (4) in movement; (5) outside; (6) above, on 
the surface of; (7) below, beneath; (8) with a weapon or 
instrument ; (9) with or on the body; (10) with the mouth; 

t A, Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 305. 2 Ibid., p. 396 


156 HOW NATIVES THINK 


(11) with the back; (12) near or in the fire; (13) in taking 
away; (14) in making a gesture; (15) in somebody’s interest ; 
(16) in calling by name; (17) with verbs expressing desire ; 
(18) as regarding the degree of accomplishment attained 
(inceptive, continuative, executed in part only, completely, 
lastingly).1 

This method of specifying the details of the action expressed 
or the object denoted may be pursued almost indefinitely 
by the help of affixes. To take an example from Klamath, 
the verb gdlepka means to raise oneself, to mount to. By 
adding an k it indicates mounting upon something by using 
one’s hands. Then ge’hldptcha signifies doing this en route, 
while walking or travelling, and finally ge’ hldpichapka expresses 
the fact that one does this at a distance from, and unseen 
by, others. In the passage quoted, the last of these expresses 
the act of a prisoner who escapes on horseback during the 
night. “To carry a child’’ may be expressed in a variety 
of ways, the main differences being whether the infant is 
carried on its plank-cradle or without it; on the arm or on 
the back; whether borne to the hut, or outside it, etc.3 
Details which would be absolutely insignificant to us become 
the ground of fine distinctions between verbs which we should 
call synonymous, but which are not so to the Indian. Gatschet 
tells us that occasionally their reason for expressing the same 
act or the same condition by different verbs is not due to 
a difference in the act or condition, but to divergences in 
the subjects and objects of the verb as to shape, quality, and 
number. . . . They have eight terms to express seizing, twelve 
for separating, fourteen for washing. Many other instances 
illustrative of the niceties of perception and the wealth of 
descriptive terms in the language might be given. 

This quality, however, as we know, is not the sole pre- 
rogative of the Klamath Indians. Such a characteristic is 
found, no less marked, among their neighbours, and it is 
common to most of the languages spoken by the North 
American tribes. In the Hurons’ tongue, ‘‘in describing a 
journey, the expressions used differ according to whether 
it was accomplished by land orsea. The active verbs increase 


1 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, pp. 397-8. 
2 Ibid., p. 68. 3 Ibid., pp. 698-9. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 157 


in proportion with the things which may be done ; for instance, 
the verb expressing eating varies with the number of 
comestibles in the case. Action is described differently for 
animate or inanimate objects; to see a man, and to see a 
stone, requires two verbs. To use something which belongs 
to the user must be expressed differently from the verb which 
indicates the use of some other person’s property.t With 
the Nez-percés, verbs assume different forms according to 
whether the subject or object is advancing or retreating.? 
In the language of the Yahgans, there are ten thousand verbs, 
the number of which is considerably increased by the use of 
prefixes and suffixes, to indicate whence one comes or whither 
one goes, to north, south, east, or west, above, below, outside, 
inside, and we are told that these differences are almost 
inexhaustible, even without reckoning the locative adverbs.3 
The Abipones, we are told, have an incredible number of 
synonyms, for they have different words to indicate wound- 
ing by the teeth of man or animal, by a knife, a sword, or an 
arrow; to express fighting with a spear, arrows, the fists, or 
indulging in wordy warfare ; to indicate that the two wives 
of a man are fighting about him, etc. . . . Different particles 
are affixed to indicate exactly the place and varying positions 
of the subject of discourse; above, below, around, in the 
water, in the air, on the surface, etc. There are many diverse 
forms of the verb “to follow,’’ for example, and a person 
coming, going, following with his hand something below or 
above him, following with his eyes, or with his mind, or 
following other people, may all be expressed.4 In South 
Africa, Livingstone found that verbs possessed the same power 
of expressing delicate shades of meaning. “It is not the 
want, but the superabundance of names that misleads 
travellers, and the terms used are so multifarious that good 
scholars will at times scarcely know more than the subject 
of conversation. . . . We have heard about a score of words 
to indicate different varieties of gait—one walks leaning 


t Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, iii. 
pp. 196-7. 


2 Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, iii. 
p. 622. | 

3 T. Bridges, ‘‘ Notes on the Structure of the Yahgan,” /.4.1., xxiii. 
pp. 53-80. 


4 Dobrizhoffer, op. cit., ii. pp. 186-090. 


158 HOW NATIVES THINK | 
forward, or backward; swaying from side to side; loungingly 
or smartly ; swaggeringly; swinging the arms, or only one 
arm ; head down or up, or otherwise : each of these modes of 
walking was expressed by a particular verb. . . .”’1 


IV 


From these and many similar facts which might be quoted, 
we see that the languages of primitive peoples “always 
express their ideas of things and actions in the precise fashion 
in which these are presented to the eye or ear.”’ 2 They have 
a common tendency to describe, not the impression which the 
subject receives, but the shape and contour, position, move- 
ment, way of acting, of objects in space—in a word, all that 
can be perceived and delineated. They try to unite the 
graphic and the plastic elements of that which they desire 
to express. We may perhaps understand this need of theirs 
if we note that the same peoples, as a rule, speak another 
language as well, a language whose characteristics necessarily 
react upon the minds of those who use it, influencing their 
way of thought and, as a consequence, their speech. These 
peoples, in fact, make use of sign-language, at least in certain 
circumstances, and where it has fallen into disuse, there are 
still traces which show that it assuredly has existed. Very 
frequently, moreover, it is used without the explorers becoming 
aware of it, either because the natives do not employ it in their 
presence, or because the fact has escaped attention. One 
of them, according to Roth, took these gestures for masonic 
signs ! 3 

Nevertheless, in cases where the most undeveloped peoples 
are concerned, we have some explicit testimony. Spencer 
and Gillen have observed this in Australia. ‘‘ Amongst the 
Warramunga, widows are not allowed to speak sometimes 
for as long a period as twelve months, during the whole of 
which time they communicate only by means of gesture 
language, in which latter they are so proficient that they 


t Livingstone, The Zambesi and its Tributaries, p. 537. 
_ 4 Schoolcraft, Information, ii. p. 


341 
3 W. E. Roth, Ethnological Studies among the N.W. Central Queensland 
Aborigines, No. 72. 


= order à 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 159 


prefer, even where there is no obligation upon them to do so, 
to use it in preference to speaking. Not seldom, when a 
party of women are in camp, there will be almost perfect 
silence and yet a brisk conversation is all the while being 
conducted on their fingers, or rather with their hands and 
arms, as many of the signs are made by putting the hands, 
or perhaps the elbows, in varying positions.”: ‘In the case : 
of the widows, mothers, and mothers-in-law ”’ (of Northern 
tribes) ‘this ban’’ (of silence) ‘extends over the whole 
period of mourning, and even at the expiration of this the 
women will sometimes voluntarily remain silent. . . . There 
is a very old woman in the camp at Tennant Creek who has 
not spoken for more than twenty-five years.”2 In South 
Australia, ‘after a death . . . the old women may refuse to 
speak for two or three months, expressing what they want to 
say by gestures with the hands—a sort of deaf and dumb 
language which the men are as adept in as the women.” 3 
Like the Cooper’s Creek natives, those of the Port Lincoln 
district make use of many signs which are very necessary to 
the chase, not uttering a word the while. By using their 
hands they can inform their companions what animals they 
have found, and exactly where these are... . They have, 
too, signs for all varieties of game.4 Howitt collected a 
certain number of the signs used by the Cooper’s Creek natives 
in their gesture-language.s Roth has given us a fairly 
detailed dictionary of it, and he was able to prove that the | 
language he had thus formulated was understood and 
practised throughout the North of Queensland. In the 
Dieyerie tribe, it was found that an extensive sign-language 
existed side by side with the oral one, and that all animals, 
natives, both men and women, the sky, the ground, walking, 
riding, jumping, flying, swimming, eating and drinking, 
and a vast number of other things or acts all possessed their 


1 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Pp. 500—1. 

* The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, PP. 525, 527. 

3 “‘ On the Habits of the Aborigines in the District of Powell Creek,’’ 
etc., J.AJ., xxiv. p. 178. 

¢ Wilhelmi, Manners and Customs of the Natives of the Port Lincoln District, 
quoted by Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, i. p. 186. 

5 Ibid., ii. p. 308. 
: 6 Ethnological Studies among the N.W. Central Queensland Aborigines, 
chap. iv. 


160 HOW NATIVES THINK 


own particular signs which enabled a conversation to be 
carried on without a single spoken word." 

In the Torres Straits, gesture-language was noted both 
in the eastern and western islands, and Haddon regrets that 
he did not collect its signs.2 It has been met with in (German) 
New Guinea also.3 To give but one instance in Africa, “ the 
Masai have a sign-language which is well developed, as Fischer 
reports.” 4 

Dobrizhoffer noticed an Abipone medicine-man who could 
communicate with others secretly, so that nobody should 
hear a sound, and this he did by means of gestures in which 
hands, arms, and head all played their part. His colleagues 
replied, and thus they were able to keep in touch with each 
other.s Language of this kind appears to be very general 
throughout the whole of South America. The Indians of 
the various tribes do not understand each other’s speech, but 
they can communicate with each other by signs.6 

Finally, it seems to be clear that in North America sign- 
language has been used everywhere: we have only to recall 
Mallery’s monograph on the subject which appeared in the 
first volume of the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnography. 
It is a real language, possessing its own vocabulary, forms, 
and syntax. ‘‘ We might,” says one explorer, “ formulate a 
complete grammar of this language by gesture. ¢ . . We may 
judge of its prolixity from the fact that Indians of different 
tribes, who do not know a word of each other’s oral language, 
can gossip together for half a day, and tell each other all 
manner of things merely by the movements of their fingers 
or heads and feet.” 7 Boas relates that a language of this 
kind was still fairly prevalent in the interior of British 
Columbia in 1890.8 


1 S, Gason, The Dieyerie Tribe, in Woods, The Native Tribes of South 
Australia, p. 290. 

2 The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, iii. pp. 255-62. Cf. J.A-L., 
xix. p. 380. 

3 Hagen, Unter den Papuas, pp. 211-12. 

4 Dr. G. A. Fischer, quoted by Widenmann, “ Die Kilimandjaro-Bevôl- 
kerung,’’ Petermann’s Mitteilungen, No. 129 (1889). 

5 Dobrizhoffer, op. cit., 11. p. 327. 

6 Spix and Martius, Travels in Brazil, ii. p. 252. 

7 Kohl, Kitcht Gami: Wanderings round Lake Superior, pp. 140-1. 

8 F, Boas, ‘ The North-western Tribes of Canada,” Report of British 
Association, pp. 291 et seq. (1890). 


3 CO NE 
Pie a eae 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 161 


In most primitive societies, therefore, two languages, the 
one oral, the other by means of gesture, exist side by side. 
Are we to assume that they do so without exerting any mutual 
influence, or must we believe, on the other hand, that the 
same mentality expresses itself by both, and conversely 
is modelled upon them? The latter view appears the more 
acceptable, and it is indeed confirmed by the facts. In a 
very important work upon “‘ manual concepts,” F. H. Cushing ! 
lays stress upon the relations between language expressed by 
manual movements and the spoken language. He demon- 
strated how the Zuñi order of the cardinal points and the 
formation of nouns of number originated in definite move- 
ments of the hands. At the same time he demonstrated in 
his own case, the resourcefulness of a method which belongs 
to him, and which his personal genius (the expression is not 
too strong) as well as the circumstances of his life, enabled 
him to apply very happily. 

To understand the mentality of ‘ primitives,” we must 
endeavour to reconstitute in ourselves conditions which re- 
semble theirs as closely as possible. On this point we are all 
agreed. Cushing lived among the Zuñis ; he lived with them, 
and like them ; he was initiated into their rites and ceremonies ; 
he became a member of their secret societies, and really was 
as one among the rest. But he did more than this, and herein 
lies the originality of his method. With infinite patience he 
revived the primitive functions of his own hands, living over 
again with them their experiences of prehistoric days, with 
the same material and under the same conditions as at that 
period, when the hands were so at one with the mind that they 
veally formed a part of it. The progress of civilization was 
brought about by reciprocal influence of mind upon hand and 
vice versa. To reconstitute the primitives’ mentality, he 
had to rediscover the movements of their hands, movements 
in which their language and their thought were inseparably 
united. Hence the daring yet significant expression ‘‘ manual 
concepts.” The primitive who did not speak without his 
hands did not think without them either. The difficulties 
which the application of the method suggested and employed 
by Cushing entail are considerable. He alone, probably, 

* “ Manual Concepts,” American Anthropologist, v. pp. 291 et seq. 

II 


, 


162 HOW NATIVES THINK 


or men endowed with the same unusual tendencies and the 
same patience as he, would be able to put it into practice 
profitably, but it certainly led him to valuable results. For 
instance, Cushing shows how the extreme specializing of 
verbs, which we have noted everywhere in the languages of 
primitives, is a natural consequence of the part which the 
manual movements play in their mental activity. He 
declares this to have been a grammatical necessity, and says 
that in the primitive mind thought-expressions, expression- 
concepts, complex yet mechanically systematic, were effected 
more quickly than, or as quickly as, the equivalent verbal 
expression came into being.? | 

Speaking with the hands is literally thinking with the 
hands, to a certain extent; therefore the features of these 
‘manual concepts” will necessarily be reproduced in the 
verbal expression of thought. The general processes in 
expression will be similar: the two languages, the signs of 
which differ so widely as gestures and articulate sounds, will 
be affiliated by their structure and their method of inter- 
preting objects, actions, conditions. If verbal language, 
therefore, describes and delineates in detail positions, motions 
distances, forms, and contours, it is because sign-language uses 
exactly the same means of expression. 

In this respect there is nothing more instructive than the 
sign-language of N.W. Queensland, of which Roth has given 
us a detailed description. In this language, as in the other, 
the real vital unit is not primarily the isolated sign or gesture 
any more than the word, but the sentence or the complex 
ensemble, of varying length, which expresses in inseparable 
fashion a complete meaning. The significance of a gesture 
lies in the “context.” Thus the gesture of a boomerang 
may express not only the object itself, but also, according 
to the context, the idea of reaching or killing something with 
it, or of making, or stealing, it. An interrogative gesture 
awakens the idea of a question, but the nature of the demand 
depends upon that which has preceded or is to follow.? 

Moreover, the ‘‘ideograms’”’ which serve to denote 
persons, things, and actions, are nearly always descriptive 


t ** Manual Concepts,” American Anthropologist, pp. 310-11. 
3 W. E. Roth, op. cit., No. 72. À 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 163 


of movement. They reproduce either the attitudes or familiar 
movements of living beings (quadrupeds, birds, fishes, etc.) 
or the movements used in capturing them, or in creating or 
employing some object, etc. For instance, to denote the 
porcupine, manual movements exactly describe its quaint way 
of burrowing into the earth and throwing it aside, its quills, 
its manner of raising its little ears. To express water, the 
ideogram reproduces the way in which the native laps up 
the liquid he has taken in his hand. For collar, the two hands 
are put in the position of encircling the neck, with a gesture 
of closing them behind, and so forth. Weapons are minutely 
described to the eyes by the gestures employed in making 
use of them. In short, the man who speaks this language 
has at his disposal a great number of fully-formed visual 
motor associations and the idea of persons or things, when 
it presents itself to his mind, immediately sets these associa- 
tions going. We may say that he imagines them at the 
moment he describes them. His verbal language, therefore, 
can but be descriptive also. Hence the importance given 
to contour, form, situation, position, method of movement, 
visual characteristics of persons and things in general; hence 
the classification of objects according to whether they are 
standing, lying, seated, etc. Mallery tells us that the words 
of an Indian language which are synthetic and undifferentiated 
parts of speech are strictly analogous in this respect with 
the gestures which are the elements of sign-language, and 
that the study of the latter is valuable for the purpose of 
comparison with the words. The one language explains the 
other, and neither can be studied to advantage if the other 
be unknown.! 

Mallery’s study of the sign-language of the North American 
Indians was very searching, and he endeavoured to formulate 
a syntax of it. Of this we have but to retain that which 
throws light upon the mental habits of those using it, and at 
the same time illustrates their verbal language. The latter 
is necessarily descriptive. It may even happen that it is 
accompanied by gestures which are not only a spontaneous 
expression of emotion, but an indispensable element of the 
language itself. With the Halkomelem of British Columbia, 


t Mallery, “‘ Sign-language,” E. B. Rept., i. p. 351. 


164 HOW NATIVES THINK 


for instance, ‘it may boldly be affirmed that at least a third 
part of the meaning of their words and sentences is expressed _ 
in those aids to primitive language, gestures and tonal diff- 
erences... ' The Coroados of Brazil complete and perfect the 
meaning of their sentences by their accent, the speed or 
slowness of the pronunciation, and certain signs made with 
hand or mouth, or other gestures. If the Indian wishes to 
indicate that he is going to the wood, he says ‘wood go,” 
and a movement of his mouth shows the direction that he 
intends to take.? 

Even among the Bantu peoples who, as a rule, belong to 
a type of community which is fairly advanced, the oral 
language, itself very descriptive, is constantly accompanied 
by movements of the hand joined with the demonstrative 
pronouns. It is true that such movements are no longer 
actual signs, like those which constitute a language by gesture ; 
but they are aids to the exact description which is given by 
means of words. For instance, a native will scarcely ever 
be heard to use a vague expression such as “ he has lost an 
eye’; but since he has noticed which eye it was, he will 
say, pointing to one of his own, “‘ this is the eye he has lost.” 
In the same way, he will not say that two places lie at a 
distance of three hours’ journey, but rather, ‘If you start 
when the sun is there, you will arrive when it is there,” at 
the same time indicating different parts of the sky. So, too, 
first, second, and third are not indicated by words, but by the 
pronoun ¢his, with the first, second or third finger extended.3 

It is not even essential that these ‘‘ aids’’ to description 
should be gestures and movements exclusively. The need 
for description may seek its fulfilment by means of Laut- 
bilder, as the German explorers call them, i.e. delineations or 
reproductions of that which they wish to express, obtained by 
means of the voice. Westermann tells us that the language 
of the Ewe tribes is richly endowed with the means of in- 
terpreting an impression received by direct sounds. Such 
prolixity proceeds from the almost irresistible tendency to 

1 Hill Tout, “ Ethnographical Reports ... Halkomelem British Columbia,’ 
J.A.I., xxxiv. p. 367. 

* Spix and Martius, Travels in Brazil, ii. pp. 254- 


3 Torrend, Comparative Grammar of the South African Bantu Languages, 
p. 218. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 165 


imitate all one hears or sees, and in general, all one perceives, 
and to describe it by means of a sound or sounds, chiefly, of 
movements. But there are also imitations or vocal repro- 
ductions of these Lautbilder for sounds, odours, tastes, tactile 
impressions. There are some used in connection with the 
expression of colour, fulness, degree, grief, well-being, and so 
on. It does not admit of doubt that many words, properly 
so called (nouns, verbs, and adjectives), have their origin in 
these Lautbilder. Properly speaking, they are not onoma- 
topceic words; they are descriptive vocal gestures rather. 
An example will best explain them. 

“In the Ewe language,” says Westermann, ‘as in many 
related languages, we find a very special kind of adverb... . 
which as a rule describes a single action or state, or a single 
property of objects, which therefore are applicable to a single 
verb only, and are never found in connection with any other. 
Many verbs, especially those descriptive of a transmission 
through the organs of sense, have a whole series of such 
adverbs to give more precision to the action, state or property 
they express... . These adverbs are actually Lautbilder, 
vocal imitations of sense-impressions. . . . For instance, the 
word zo, to walk, may be joined with the following adverbs, 
which are used only with it, and which describe various kinds 
of walking, or different gaits : 1 


Zo bafo bafo—the gait of a little man whose limbs shake very much 

while he is walking. 

Zo béhe behe—to walk with a dragging step, like a feeble person. 

Zo bia bia—the gait of a long-legged man, who throws his legs forward. 

Zo boho boho—of a corpulent man, who walks heavily. 

Zo bula bula—to walk in a dazed fashion, without looking ahead. 

Zo dzé dze—an energetic and firm step. 

Zo dabo dabo—a hesitating, feeble step, shaking. 

Zo goe gde—to walk swinging the head and the buttocks. 

Zo gowu gowu—to walk with a slight limp, the head bent forward. 

Zo hloyt hloyi—to walk with many things, or with clothes floating 
around. 

Zo ka ka—to walk proudly, upright, without moving the body 
unnecessarily. 

Zo kédzo kodzo—the gait of a tall man or animal, with the head 
slightly bent. 

Zo kondobre hondobre—like the last, but with a feeble and lifeless step. 


1 Cf. Livingstone’s observation, quoted on pp. 157-8. 


166 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Zo kondzva kondzva—to walk with long steps, drawing in the abdomen. 

Zo kpadi kpadi—to walk with the elbows close to the sides. 

Zo kpo kpo—to walk quietly and easily. 

Zo kpudu kpudu—the short hasty step of a little man. 

Zo kundo kundo—like kondobre kondobre—but not in any unfavourable 
sense. 

Zo ltimo l#mo—the quick gait of small animals like rats and mice. 

Zo moe moe—like gôe gôe. 

Zo pla pla—to walk with small steps. 

Zo st si—the light step of small people who sway. 

Zo taka taka—to walk carelessly and heedlessly. 

Zo tyatyra tyatyra—a quick but rigid step. 

Zo tyende tyende—to walk shaking the abdomen. 

Zo tya tya—to walk quickly. 

Zo tyadi tyadi—to walk with a limping or dragging step. 

Zo ty6 tyé—the well-poised and firm step of a very tall person. 

Zo wido wudo—the quiet step (in a favourable sense), specially women’s. 

Zo wla wla—a quick, light, unencumbered gait. | 

Zo wui wui—quick, rapid. 

Zo wé wé—the walk of a fat man who advanced with a rigid step. 

Zo wiata wiata—to advance with a firm and energetic step; said 
specially of people with long legs. 


These thirty-three adverbs do not exhaust the list of those 
used to describe the manner of walking. Moreover, most 
of them may be met with in two forms: an ordinary and a 
diminutive one, according to the stature of the subject of 
discourse.t Naturally, there are similar adverbs or Lautbilder 
for all the other movements, such as running, climbing, swim- 
ming, riding, driving, for instance.? Finally, these descriptive 
adverbs are not joined to the verb as if the idea occurred in 
two points of time: firstly a conception of walking in general, 
and then the particular method being specified by means of 
the Lautbild. On the contrary, to the minds concerned, the 
conception of walking in general never presents itself alone : 
it is always a certain way of walking that they thus delineate 
vocally. Westermann even notes that as the delineation by 
degrees gives place to a real concept, the special adverbs 
tend to disappear, and other more general ones, such as very, 
much, to a great extent, etc., etc., are substituted.3 

The same descriptive auxiliaries are noted in the Bantu 
languages. In Loango, for instance, ‘‘each man uses the 


* Dr. Westermann, Grammatik dev Ewesprache, pp. 83-4. 
a TDIGS. Ded 30, 3 Ibid., p. 82. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 167 


language in his own way, or . . . to speak more correctly, 
the language issues from the mouth of each according to 
the circumstances and his own mood at the time. This use 
of language is unrestrained and natural as the sounds uttered 
by the birds, and I cannot think of any more apt comparison.”’ 1 
To put it in another way, words are not something fixed and 
immutable once for all, but the vocal gesture describes, 
delineates, expresses graphically, in the same way as the 
gesture of the hands, the action or thing in question. In 
the Ronga tongue there are “ certain words which the Bantu 
grammarians regard generally as interjections or onomatopceics. 
They are usually vocables of one syllable only, by means of 
which natives express the sudden and direct impression which 
a sight, sound, or idea, makes upon them, or describe a move- 
ment, an apparition, a noise. It is quite enough to have 
listened to some of the perfectly free and unrestrained conver- 
sations of negroes to note the immense number of expressions 
of this kind which they have at command. We may be 
inclined to say perhaps: ‘It is merely a childish way of 
speaking, not worth the trouble of listening to.’ The truth is 
quite the contrary, however. The naturally versatile and 
ready-witted mind of the race is reflected in this picturesque 
language. Through such words it succeeds in expressing 
shades of meaning which a more restrained language could 
not render. Again, these little words have been the origin 
of numerous verbs, and would deserve recognition on that 
account. . . . Nevertheless it must be owned that these 
descriptive adverbs vary very much with individuals. Some 
among them embellish their speech to an extent which makes 
it incomprehensible for the uninitiated, and even invent 
new expressions. Many of these words, however, are actually 
incorporated into the language understood by all.’ 2 


V 


The plastic and essentially descriptive character of the 
languages, both verbal and sign-languages, confirms what 
we have already said with regard to the special form of 


1 Dr. Pechuël-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, pp. 91-5. 
2 Junod, Grammaire Ronga, pp. 196-7. 


168 HOW NATIVES THINK 


abstraction and generalization proper to primitive mentality. 
The primitive mind is well acquainted with concepts, but 
these are not at all like ours: it forms them in another way, 
and uses them in a method which differs from that of logical 
thought. “It is our aim,” says Gatschet, “ to speak clearly 
and precisely ; the Indian’s is to speak descriptively ; while 
we classify, he individualizes.”” The following example shows 
the difference clearly. The Delaware word madholineen is 
composed of nad, a derivative of the verb naten, to seek: 
of hol, from amochol, a boat, and ineen, Which is the verbal 
termination for the first person plural. It means “ Find the 
boat for us.” It is the imperative of a verb expressing : 
I am finding the boat for you, him, etc., which is conjugated 
like any other verb . . . but is always used in a special sense. 
It always signifies: find the boat, and expresses a particular 
act, having no general meaning; it does not mean: “ find 
any boat.” This is otherwise in classical languages. The 
Latin aedifico, belligero, mdifico, do not mean build a special 
edifice, make war on a particular nation, construct a certain 
specified nest. . . . So too, doypauuarée, diroypadéw, 
prrodoged, giroSeomorevouat, dilavOpwréw, do not express a 
preference for a certain book, picture, etc. They express a 
general love of literature, painting, and so forth. Had they 
a special meaning at some remote period of their history ? 
There is nothing to tell us so, and we know nothing about 
it. But what we do know is, that in the development of 
primitive American languages, verbs taken in a special sense 
appeared first of all, and that if one wanted to give them a 
general application, it was done by inserting an adverbial 
particle which means “‘ habitually.” : 

Again, while it cannot be denied that those who speak 
these languages have a concept of hand, foot, ear, etc. ; their 
concepts do not resemble ours. They have what I should 
call an “image-concept,” which is necessarily specialized. 
The hand or foot they imagine is always the hand or foot 
of a particular person, delineated at the same time. Powell 
tells us that in many Indian tongues of North America there 
is no distinct word for eye, hand, arm, or the other parts 


* Gallatin, in Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, ii. 
pp. 136-8, 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 169 


or organs of the body; but such are always found incor- 
porated with or attached to a pronoun which signifies the 
possessor. If an Indian were to find an arm that had fallen 
from an operating-table, he would say “‘ I have found his arm ”” 
(i.e. someone’s), and such linguistic peculiarity, though not 
universal, is met with frequently.1 It is to be found in many 
other languages, too. For instance, the Bakairi of Brazil 
do not say “‘ tongue,” but always add a pronominal adjective, 
my tongue, your tongue, etc.; and this rule applies to the 
other parts of the body.2 The same holds good for terms 
denoting relationship, father, mother, etc., which are very 
rarely used alone. In the Marshall Archipelago, “there is 
no generic term for ‘father,’ the word never being used 
save in conjunction, and applied to a particular person. It is 
the same for ‘ mother, brother, sister,’ ”” etc.3 

The language spoken by the natives of the Gazelle 
peninsular of the Bismark Archipelago, ‘like most of the 
Melanesian languages, and some of the Micronesian (of the 
Gilbert Islands) and of Papua, make use of the possessive 
pronoun as a suffix when expressing substantives denoting 
relationship, parts of the body, and some prepositions.” 4 

Grierson had noted that in the north-eastern provinces of 
India, the word “‘ father,” as a general idea, not connected with 
any special person, and therefore requiring a certain amount 
of abstractive thought, was never used alone, but always 
in conjunction with a possessive pronoun. . . . A hand, also, 
could not be imagined save as belonging to somebody, and 
even when the possessive form of the sentence rendered the 
pronoun unnecessary, the tendency to specialization was so 
strong that it was still added, as “‘ of my mother her hand.” 5 
In the Angami tongue, nouns denoting parts of the body, 
or expressing relationship, had to be preceded by a possessive 
pronoun.6 The same held good for the Sema language.7 
This is a very common feature, and it helps us to understand 
how it is that in primitive societies we ate those complicated 


1 “ The Evolution of Language,’’ E. B. Rept., i. p. 
a K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvôlkern Zentralbrasiliens, D.,92. 
‘Die Ebon- -Gruppe im Marshall’s Archipel,” Journal des Muséum 
our. i. pp. 39-40 
4 Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee, p. 730. . 
5 Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, iii. 3, pp. 16-17. 
A Sbid:. Urge pico: 1:1Did} 12, Pp, 223) 


170 HOW NATIVES THINK 


degrees of rueunehiD which prove so confusing to the 
European, and which he masters only with difficulty. He tries 
to conceive of them 77 abstracto, but the native never envisages 
them thus. In his childhood he learned that certain persons 
stood in such and such a relation to certain others, and the 
learning required no more trouble or thought than the rules 
of his (frequently just as complicated) mother-tongue. 

The nearer the mentality of a given social group approaches 
the prelogical, the more do these image-concepts predominate. 
The language bears witness ‘to this, for there is an almost 
total absence of generic terms to correspond with general 
ideas, and at the same time an extraordinary abundance of 
specific terms, those denoting persons and things of whom 
or which a clear and precise image occurs to the mind as 
soon as they are mentioned. Eyre had already remarked 
upon this with the Australian aborigines. He states that 
generic terms such as tree, fish, bird, etc., were lacking, 
although specific terms were applied to every variety of tree, 
fish or bird.t We are told that the natives of the Tyers Lake 
district, Gippsland, have no words for these either, but all 
the species such as bream, perch, mullet, are distinguished 
in each class? The Tasmanians had no words to represent 
abstract ideas, and though they could denote every variety 
of gum-tree or bush, by name, they had no word for tree. 
They could not express qualities, such as hard, soft, hot, 
cold, round, tall, short, etc. To signify “‘hard’’ they would 
say: like a stone; for tall, big legs; round, like a ball; 
like the moon; and so on, always combining their words 
with gestures, designed to bring what they were describing 
before the eyes of the person addressed.3 

In the Bismark Archipelago ‘there are no names for 
colours. Colour is always indicated in the following way. 
The object in question is always compared with another, 
the colour of which has been accepted as a kind of standard. 
For instance, they will say : This looks like, or has the colour 
of a crow. In the course of time, the substantive alone has 


been used in adjectival sense. . . . Black is named after 
1 Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, ii. 
PP. 392-3. 


2 Bulmer, quoted by Brough Smyth, The Grete of Victoria, ii. p. 27. 
8 Ibid., 112} Di 413. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 171 


the various things from which this colour is obtained, or else 
a black object is named. Thus the word “ kotkot” (crow) 
is used to denote black. Everything that is black, especially 
things that are glossy black, is called thus. Lzkutan or lukutan 
also means black, but rather in the sense of dark; toworo is 
the black colour derived from burnt candle-nuts ; Juluba, 
the black mud in the mangrove swamps ; dep, the black colour 
obtained from burning canary-wood gum; wtur, the colour 
of burnt betel-nut leaves mixed with oil. All these words are 
used for black, according to the circumstances of the case: 
there are just as many for other colours, white, green, red, 
blue, and so forth,’’ } 

It is the same with the Coroados of Brazil. ‘ Their 
languages extend only to the denomination of the objects 
immediately surrounding them, and often express the pre- 
dominant quality of things by imitative sounds. They 
distinguish with great precision the internal and external 
parts of the body, the various animals and plants, and the 
relation of such natural objects to each other is frequently 
indicated in a very expressive manner by the words them- 
selves; thus the Indian names of monkeys and palms were 
guides ‘to us in examining the genera and species, for almost 
every species has its particular Indian name. But it would 
be in vain to seek among them words for the abstract ideas 
of plant, animal, and the abstract notions colour, tone, sex, 
species, etc. Such a generalization of ideas is found only in 
the frequently used infinitive of the verbs to walk, eat, drink, 
dance, see, hear, etc.”’2 In California, ‘‘ there are no genera, 
no species: every oak, pine, or grass has its separate 
name.” 3 | 

Everything being represented in these ‘‘ image-concepts,” 
i.e. delineations in which the slightest peculiarity is shown 
—and this not only for the natural species of all animate 
nature, but for objects of all kinds, whatever they be, all 
movements or actions, all states or qualities which language 
expresses—it follows that these “ primitive ” languages have 


€ 


t Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Siidsee, pp. 143-5. Cf. The Cambridge 
Expedition to Torres Strants, ii. pp. 55-68. 

2 Spix and Martius, Travels in Brazil, ii. pp. 252-3. Cf. The Cambridge 
Expedition to Torres Straits, ii. 1, pp. 44, 64. 

3 Powers, Tribes of California, p. 419. 


172 HOW NATIVES THINK 


a wealth of vocabulary unknown to ours. This extensive 
vocabulary has been the source of wonder to many explorers. 
‘They ”’ (the Australian aborigines) ‘have names for almost 
every minute portion of the human frame; thus, in asking 
the name for the arm, one stranger would get the name for 
the upper arm, another for the lower arm, another for the 
right arm, another for the left arm, etc.”’1 “The Maoris have 
a most complete system of nomenclature for the flora of 
New Zealand. They are acquainted with the sex of trees, 
etc., and have distinct names for the male and female of 
some trees. Also they have different names for trees which 
change the form of their leaves, at the different stages of 
growth. In many cases they have a special name for the 
flowers of tree or shrub... different names for young 
unexpanded leaves and for the berries. . . . The koko or tut 
bird has four names ; two for the male and two for the female 
according to the seasons of the year. There are different 
names for the tail of a bird, of an animal, of a fish; three 
names for the cry of the kaka parrot (in anger, fear, or in 
ordinary circumstances).”’ 2 

Speaking of the Bawenda tribe of South Africa, Gottschling 
says: “ For every kind of rain there is a special name in their 
language. . . . There is not a single geographical fact of 
their country but they have given it a name of their own. 
Even geological features have not escaped their notice, for 
they have specific names for every kind of soil and also for 
every sort of stone or rock. . . . There is not a tree, shrub 
or plant that has not a name in their language. They dis- 
tinguish even every kind of grass by a different name.” 3 
Livingstone found the Bechuana vocabulary a source of 
wonder. “He” (Dr. Moffat) ‘“‘ was the first to reduce their 
speech to a written form, and has had his attention directed 
to the study for at least thirty years, so he may be 
supposed to be better adapted for the task” (of trans- 
lating the Bible) ‘‘than any man living. Some idea of the 
copiousness of the language may be formed from the fact 
that even he never spends a week at his work without dis- 


1 Grey, Journals, etc., ii. p. 209 (1841). 
2 Elsdon Best, ‘‘ Maori Nomenclature,” J/.A./., xxxii. pp. 197-8. 
3 E, Gottschling, ‘‘ The Bawenda,” J.A.J., xxxv. p. 383. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 173 


covering new words.’’!—With regard to India, Grierson 
speaks of “ the great number of terms for closely related ideas 
in the Kuki-Chin language,” making the comparison of the 
vocabularies of different dialects a matter of some difficulty. 
‘Then in Lushei,” he says, “there are ten terms for ants, 
all probably denoting various kinds of ants; twenty terms for 
basket ; different words for different kinds of deer, but no general 
word for deer.” 2—The North American Indians ‘‘ have even 
many expressions, which may be almost called scientific, for 
frequently recurring forms of the clouds, and the characteristic 
features of the sky physiognomy which are quite untranslatable, 
and for which it is hopeless to seek an equivalent in Euro- 
pean languages. Thus the Ojibbeways, for instance, have a 
peculiar fixed name for the appearance of the sunshine between 
two clouds. In the same way they have a distinct appellation 
for the small blue oases which at times are seen in the sky 
between dark clouds.’’3—The Klamath Indians have no 
generic term for fox, squirrel, butterfly or frog; but each 
species has its own name. There is an almost countless 
number of substantives in the language.4—The Lapps have 
a great many terms to denote various kinds of reindeer, 
according to their age. . . . There are twenty words for ice, 
eleven for cold, forty-one for snow in all its forms, twenty-six 
verbs to express freezing and thawing, and so on. Hence 
they resist any attempt to exchange their language for 
Norwegian, which is much more limited in this respect.s— 
Finally, the Semitic languages, and even those we ourselves 
use, have known such wealth of vocabulary. ‘‘ We must 
imagine every Indo-European language as resembling the 
modern Lithuanian speech, poor in general terms, yet well 
supplied with specific ones indicating all particular actions 
and the details of familiar objects.’’ 6 | 

The same tendency accounts for the vast number of 
special names given to single objects, and particularly to 
the least peculiarity in the soil. In New Zealand, with the 


t Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 113-14. 

* Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, iii. 3, p. 16. 

3 Kohl, Kitcht Gami: Wanderings round Lake Superior, p. 220. 

4 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, pp. 464, 500. 

5 Keane, “ The Lapps: their Origin, etc.” J.A.I., xv. p. 235. 

6 A. Meillet, Introduction à l’Etude Comparative des Langues Indo-Euro- 
péennes (2nd edit.), p. 347. ; 


174 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Maoris, ‘‘ everything has its name: their houses, canoes, 
weapons, and even garments have distinctive appellations 
given them. . . . Their lands and roads are all named; so 
also the sea beaches round the islands, their horses, cows, 
and pigs, even their trees . . . rocks and fountains. Go where 
you will, in the midst of an apparently untrodden wilderness ; 
ask, has this spot a name ? and any native belonging to that 
district will immediately give one.’’! In Southern Australia 
‘every range has its name; likewise every mountain has 
its particular name; so that blacks can state the precise 
mountain or hill in an extensive range they will meet. I 
have upwards of two hundred names of mountains in the 
Australian Alps... even every bend in the river Murray 
has a name.’’2 In Western Australia, the natives ‘‘ have 
names for all the conspicuous stars, for every natural feature 
of the ground, every hill, swamp, bend of a river, etc., but 
not for the river itself.” 3—Lastly, not to prolong this list 
unduly, in the Zambesi district, ‘every knoll, hill, mountain, 
and every peak on a range has a name, and so has every 
watercourse, dell, and plain. In fact, every feature or portion 
of the country is so distinguished by appropriate names that 
it would take a lifetime to decipher their meaning.” 4 


VI 


On the whole, therefore, the characteristics of the languages 
spoken by primitives correspond with those we have noted 
in their mentality. The image-concepts, which are a kind of 
delineation, allowing of a limited generality and elementary 
abstraction only, yet involve remarkable development of 
memory, and thus give rise to the wealth of form and 
vocabulary. Where logical thought has obtained the upper 
hand the social treasure of acquired knowledge is transmitted 
and preserved by means of concepts. Each generation in 
instructing that which succeeds teaches it to analyse these 
concepts, to draw out what is included in them, to recognize 
and make use of the resources of abstract reasoning. In the 


1 R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, pp. 328-9. 

2 Quoted by Brough Smyth, in The Aborigines of Victoria, ii. p. 122 (note). 
3 Ibid., p. 266. 

4 Livingstone, The Zambesi and its Tributaries, pp. 537-8. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 175 


peoples whom we are considering, on the contrary, this treasure 
is still entirely, or almost entirely, explicit in the language 
itself. It cannot fail to be transmitted, because the children 
try to imitate their parents’ speech, without any teaching, 
properly so called, without any intellectual effort, simply by 
memory. It is accordingly not susceptible to progress. 
Supposing that the mieu and the institutions of a social 
group do not change, its general mentality not changing either, 
its wealth of image-concepts would be transmitted from 
generation to generation without any great variation. When 
it does change, other changes are at work also, and usually 
it becomes impoverished. 

Advance in conceptual and abstract thought is accom- 
panied by a diminution in the descriptive material which 
served to express the thought when it was more concrete. 
The Indo-European languages have undoubtedly evolved in 
this sense. In British Columbia, ‘on the coast, when a 
masculine or a feminine article is used, the same terms serve 
for male and female relations. Here’ (among the Salish) 
‘ where there is no grammatical distinction between the sexes, 
separate terms are used. It is worth remarking that the 
Bilqula, who have grammatical distinction of sex, distinguish 
between but afew of these terms This may indicate that the 
separate forms have been lost by the tribes who use gram- 
matical sex.’’! The increasing generality of the concepts causes 
them by degrees to lose the exactness which characterized 
them when they were at the same time, and primarily, images, 
delineations, and vocal gestures. “Little by little,’ says 
Victor Henry, ‘the idea of these finer shades of meaning 
becomes obscured, so that the present-day Aleutians make 
use of one single verbal form with many different meanings, 
or several forms with one acceptation impartially, and the 
native who is questioned about the reason which makes him 
prefer one form to another will usa, be unable to account 
for his preference.’’ 2 

This gradual impoverishment, iS is the general rule, 
shows ety that the specializing terminology, and the 


1 F. Boas, “ The North-western Tribes of Canada,” British Association 
eo) pp. 690-1 (1890). 
? V. Henry, Esquisse d’une Grammaire Raisonnée de la Langue Aléoute, 
P: 54. 


à 
176 HOW NATIVES THINK 


meticulous attention to detail, were not the result of desired 
and conscious effort, but merely of the necessity which the 
mode of expression demanded. Image-concepts could only be 
rendered and communicated by a kind of delineation, either 
by means of actual gestures, or oral expressions which are 
a species of vocal gesture, of which the “ auxiliary descriptive 
adverbs ’’ have provided a very clear example. As soon as 
the development of general ideas and abstract concepts 
permitted men to express themselves more easily, they did 
so, without troubling about the loss of the graphic precision 
which resulted. In fact, the ingenuity, extent and delicacy 
of the distinctions perceived and expressed, between the 
varieties of the same species of plants or animals, for example, 
must not lead us to believe that in them we have a mentality 
oriented like our own, towards the recognition of objective 
reality. We know that their mentality is otherwise oriented. 
In the reality of persons and things as their collective repre- 
sentations suggest them, the mystic, invisible factors, the 
occult powers, the secret participations, hold an incomparably 
higher place than the elements we consider objective. We 
need no other proof of this than the part played by notions 
like mana, wakan, orenda, taboo, contamination, and so forth. 
It is even sufficient to consider the classifications of entities 
that have been established. With primitive peoples, the 
principle of classification, disdaining the most striking objec- 
tive traits, is founded preferably upon a mystic participation. 
The sum total of all entities is divided up as are the individuals 
of the social group; trees, animals, stars, belong to this or 
that totem or clan or phratry. In spite of appearances, 
then, these minds, which evidently have no idea of genera, 
have none of species, families, or varieties either, although 
they are able to delineate them in their language. Their 
classification 1s something purely pragmatic, born of the 
necessity for action and expression, in which reflection has — 
no part. So little of knowledge is therein that, for real 
knowledge to be formed, this material of thought and expres- 
sion must first give place to another, and the image-concepts, 
which are at once both general and particular, must be super- 
seded by concepts which are really general and abstract. 

The language, too, will have been forced to lose the mystic 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 177 


character which it necessarily assumes among primitive 
peoples. To their minds, as we already know, there is no 
perception unaccompanied by a mystic complex, no pheno- 
menon which is simply a phenomenon, no sign that is not 
more than a sign: how then could a word be merely a word ? 
Every form that an object assumes, every plastic image and 
every delineation has mystic virtues: verbal expression, 
which is an oral delineation, must perforce possess them also. 
And this power does not pertain to proper nouns alone, but 
to all terms, whatever they may be. Moreover, names which 
express very specialized image-concepts do not differ from 
proper nouns nearly as much as our common nouns do. 

Hence it follows that the use of words can never be a 
matter of indifference: the mere fact of uttering them, like 
the tracing of a drawing or the making of a gesture, may 
establish or destroy important and formidable participations. 
There is magic influence in the word, and therefore precaution 
is necessary. Special languages for certain occasions, 
languages reserved for certain classes of persons, begin to 
take shape. Thus, in a great many aggregates, we meet 
with a different language for men and women. Frazer 
collected many examples of this. ‘It is a feature common 
to all the American nations,” says Gallatin, ‘‘ that women 
use different words from men for those purposes ”’ (to express 
relationship) ; “and that the difference of language between 
men and women seems in the Indian languages to be almost 
altogether confined to that species of words . . . and to the 
use of interjections.’”’* At the time when the young men 
are initiated and become full members of the tribe, it often 
happens that the seniors teach them a secret language unknown 
by and unintelligible to the uninitiated. ‘I have on several 
occasions reported the existence of a secret or cabalistic 
language used only by the men at the initiation ceremonies 
of several native tribes in New South Wales. While the 
novitiates are away in the bush with the elders of the tribe, 
they are taught a mystic name for surrounding natural 
objects, animals, parts of the body, and short phrases of 


1 J. G. Frazer, “ Men’s Language and Women’s Language,” Fortnightly 
Review, January 1900. Cf. Man, No. 129 (1901). 
+ Gallatin, Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, ii. pp. 131-2. 


12 


178 HOW NATIVES THINK 


general utility.” Frequently, too, the members of the secret 
societies which are so common a feature in social groups 
of a primitive type, are initiated into a language spoken 
and understood by themselves alone; their introduction 
to the society, or their promotion to a sufficiently exalted 
rank therein, gives them the privilege of using this mystic 
language. Among the Abipones, “‘ persons promoted to the 
rank of nobles are called Hecheri and Nelereycait, and are 
distinguished from the common people even by their language. 
They generally use the same words, but so transformed by 
the interposition or addition of other letters, that they appear 
to belong to a different language. : . . Moreover, they have 
some words peculiar to themselves, by which they supersede 
those in general use.” 2 

In hunting it is essential to avoid uttering the name of 
the animals hunted, and in fishing, that of the fish that one 
desires to capture. Accordingly silence is enjoined, or the 
use of sign-language, and this accounts for the appearance 
of a special language when they are looking for camphor, 
or going fishing, or starting on a warlike expedition. A great 
many words are taboo, when the person of the king is in 
question: to eat or sleep or sit may not be expressed in 
the ordinary Malay words; special terms are essential. More- 
over, when the king is dead, his name must be uttered no 
more.3 We know that this was a very common custom in 
Madagascar. ‘‘ There are many words which are used in a 
certain sense to the king (or queen) and these words cannot 
be used in this special sense with the common people ; 
especially those which have reference to the state or health of 
the living king. . . . Other words are common to kings and 
chiefs only. . . . The king has power to make certain words 
fady, viz. to prohibit their use, it may be for a time or 
entirely.”’ 4 In many primitive societies, a woman and her 
son-in-law must avoid each other and not enter into con- 


1 Mathews, ‘‘ Languages of Some Native Tribes,’’ Journal of the Royal 
Society of New South Wales, pp. 157-8 (1903). Cf. Webster, Primitive Secret 
Societies, pp. 42-3. ’ 

2 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, ii. pp. 204-5. 

3 Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 35, 212, 315, 523. Cf. Skeat and Blagden, 
Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, ii. pp. 414-31. 

4 Last, ‘‘ Notes on the Languages Spoken in Madagascar,” J.A.JI., xxv 
p. 68. 


PRIMITIVES’ LANGUAGE 179 


versation. Nevertheless, ‘ throughout the central and south- 
west districts of Victoria and in the south-east corner of South 
Australia there is a hybrid tongue or jargon in use, com- 
prising a short code of words, by means of which a mother-in- 
law can carry on a limited conversation in the presence of 
her son-in-law respecting some events of daily life.” 1 

That which finally proves the mystic worth and power 
in words as words, is the widespread custom, in magic cere- 
monies and even in ritual and religious ceremonies, of using 
songs and formulas which are unintelligible to those who hear 
them, and sometimes even to those who utter them. For 
these songs and these formulas to be effective, it is enough 
that they have been transmitted by tradition in a sacred 
language. For instance, with the tribes of Central Australia, 
Spencer and Gillen say: ‘‘ As usual, in the case of sacred 
ceremonies, the words have no meaning known to the natives, 
and have been handed down from the Alcheringa.”2 In 
myths it appears that a change of language is frequently 
mentioned ; for instance, ‘at this spot the Achilpa changed 
their language to that of the Arunta people.’ 3 Another 
part of the tribe ‘‘camped apart and then moved on to 
Ariltha, where they changed their language to the Ilpirra 
language.” 4 ‘Somewhere out west of the river Say the 
women (Unthippa) changed their language to Arunta.’’s 
So, too, in Fiji, Banks Islands, Tanna, New Guinea, the songs 
used in the sacred ceremonies are unintelligible to those who 
are singing.6 

Throughout North America similar facts come to light. 
Jewitt noted, though without understanding, them in the 
Indians of Nootka Sound. ‘ They have,” he says, ‘‘ a number 
of songs which they sing on various occasions: war, whaling, 
fishing, marriages and feasts, etc. The language of most of 
these appears to be very different, in many respects, from 
that used in their common conversation, which leads me to 
believe, either that they have a different mode of expressing 


1 Mathews, “ Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria,’”’ 
Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, p. 305 (1905). 

a The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, PP. 286, 462, 460, 606. 

3 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 410. 

4 Ibid., p. 416. §Thid.; p. 442. 4: 

6 Sidney H. Ray, ‘‘ Melanesian and New Guinea Songs,” J.A.I., xxvi. 
PP. 430-45. 


180 HOW NATIVES THINK 


themselves in poetry, or that they borrow their songs from 
their neighbours.” ! Catlin fully realized the mystic meaning 
of this. ‘‘ Every dance has its peculiar step, and every step 
has its meaning; every dance also has its peculiar song, and 
that is so intricate and mysterious oftentimes, that not one 
in ten of the young men who are dancing and singing it know 
the meaning of the song which they are chanting over. None 
but the medicine-men are allowed to understand them; 
and even they are generally only initiated into these secret 
arcana on the payment of a liberal stipend for their tuition, 
which requires much application and study.” “A great 
portion of the phraseology of the Ojibwa ritual is in an 
archaic form of language, and is thus unintelligible to the 
ordinary Indian, and frequently to many members of the 
society. This archaic phraseology naturally appears impres- 
sive and important to the general populace, and the shamans 
delight to dwell on such phrases, not only to impress their 
hearers, but to elevate themselves as well.” 3 Of the Klamath 
Indians, ‘“ many ...do not understand all these songs, 
which contain many archaic forms and words, and the con- 
jurors themselves are generally loth to give their meaning, 
even if they should understand them.”’4 What we call the 
meaning of the words or the form matters little. The people 
remain indefinably attracted by them, because their mystic 
virtue and magic efficacy have been known from time imme- 
morial. The most accurate and intelligible translation could 
not take the place of these incomprehensible songs, for they 
could not fulfil the same office. 
t Jewitt, Adventures and Sufferings, p. 97. 
2 Catlin, The North American Indians, i. p. 142; ii. p. 181. 


3 Hoffman, ‘‘ The Memomini Indians,’”’ E. B. Rept., xiv. p. 61. 
4 À. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 160. 


CHAPTER V 


PRELOGICAL MENTALITY IN RELATION TO 
NUMERATION 


It is quite possible future works dealing with linguistics may 
confirm the theory I have suggested in the preceding chapter. 
Nevertheless, in what follows I shall confine myself to proving 
it in one particular point, upon which our documentary 
evidence is fairly complete and accessible: that is, the way in 
which different peoples, especially those of the most primitive 
type we know, practise numeration. The various methods 
of counting and calculating, of forming and using the names 
for numbers, will possibly enable us to see, actually at work, 
the mentality of primitives where it differs specifically from 
logical thought. This will serve as a specimen of proofs 
which I cannot enter upon in detail. 


I 


In a great many primitive peoples—those in Australia, 
South America, etc.—the only names for numbers are one 
and two, and occasionally three. Beyond these, the natives , 
say “ many, a crowd, a multitude.” Or else, for three, they 
say two, one; for four: two, two; for five: two, two, one. 
Hence the opinion has frequently been formed that mental 
inaptitude or extreme indolence prevents them from dis- 
criminating any number higher than three. This is a hasty 
conclusion, however. It is true that these “ primitives ” 
form no abstract concept of four, five, six, etc.; but we 
cannot legitimately infer from this that they do not count 
beyond two or three. Their minds do not readily lend them- 
selves to operations familiar to us, but by the processes which 
are peculiar to them they can obtain the same results to a 


182 HOW NATIVES THINK 


certain extent. Where synthetic representations are not 
analysed, there is more demand upon memory. Instead of 
the generalizing abstraction which provides us with our con- 
cepts, properly so called, and especially with those of number, 
their minds make use of an abstraction which preserves the 
specific characters of the given ensembles. In short, they 
count and even calculate in a way which, compared with our 
own, might properly be termed concrete. 

Since we count. by means of numbers and hardly ever 
count in any other way, we admit that in primitive societies 
which have no names for any number beyond three, it would 
be impossible to count further. But are we obliged to take 
it for granted that the apprehension of a definite plurality 
of objects can take place in one way only? Is it impossible 
for the mentality of primitive peoples to have its own peculiar 
operations and processes to attain the end we reach by 
numeration ? As a matter of fact, if a well-defined and fairly 
restricted group of persons or things interests the primitive 
ever so little, he will retain it with all its characteristics. In 
the representation he has of it the exact number of these 
persons or things is implied: it is, as it were, a quality in 
which this group differs from one which contained one more, 
or several more, and also from a group containing any lesser 
number. Consequently, at the moment this group is again 
presented to his sight, the primitive knows whether it is 
complete, or whether it is greater or less than before. 

A capability of this nature has already been noted, in 
very simple cases, among certain animals. It does happen 
that a domestic animal, a dog, ape, or elephant, perceives 
the disappearance of an object in a restricted ensemble with 
which it is familiar. In many species, the mother shows by 
unmistakable signs that she knows that one of her little ones 
has been taken from her. If we remember that according 
to most observers the primitives’ memory is ‘‘ phenomenal,” 
as Spencer and Gillen express it, or ‘‘ miraculous,” as Charlevoix 
pronounces it, we have stronger reason for believing that they 
can easily do without numerals. With the help of custom, 
each sum-total which matters to them is retained in their 
memory with the same exactness as that which makes them 


1 Ch. Leroy, Lettres sur les Animaux, p. 123. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 183 


recognize unerringly the track of such and such an animal or 
person. If anything is missing from the sum-total, they 
instantly perceive it. In the representation so faithfully 
preserved, the number of persons or things is not differentiated : 
nothing allows of its being expressed separately. It is none 
the less perceived qualitatively, or, if you prefer it, felt. 
Dobrizhoffer has testified to this fact with the Abipones. 
They refuse to count as we do, i.e. by means of numerals. 
They are not only ignorant of arithmetic, but they dislike 
it. Their memory generally fails them (because they are 
required to make use of processes with which they are not 
familiar). “They cannot endure the tedious process of 
counting : hence to rid themselves of questions on the subject, 
they show as many fingers as they like, sometimes deceived 
themselves, sometimes deceiving others. Often,’’ says Dobriz- 
hoffer, ‘‘ if the number about which you ask is more than three, 
an Abipon, to save himself the trouble of showing his fingers, 
will cry ‘ Pop,’ which means ‘ many,’ or Chic leyekalipi, ‘ in- 
numerable.’ ”’ 1 ( 
Yet they have their own way of accounting for numbers. 
“When they return from an excursion to hunt wild horses, 


or to shoot tame ones, none of the Abipones will ask them ,, _ 


“how many horses have you brought home?’ but ‘how , 
much space will the troop of horse which you have brought _ 
home occupy ?’’’2 And when they are about to start on 
an excursion, “‘as soon as they are mounted, they all look 
round, and if one dog be missing out of the many which they 
keep, begin to call him. . . . I often wondered how, without 
being able to count, they could so instantly tell if one were 
missing out of so large a pack.’’3 This last is a very charac- 
teristic reflection of Dobrizhoffer’s. It explains why it is 
that the Abipones and peoples like them, who do not make 
use of numerals, are at a loss to deal with them when they 
are first taught them. 

So, too, the Guaranis have no numerals above four (al- 
though they have terms corresponding with the Latin: 
singult, bint, trint, quaterni).4 They, ‘like the Abipones, 


t Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, ii. p. 170. 

2 Ibid 3 Ibid., ii. pp. 115-16. 

4 So, too, the Australian aborigines, who have no numerals above three. 
are yet able to conjugate in the singular, dual, trial, and plural numbers. 


184 HOW NATIVES THINK 


when questioned respecting things exceeding four, immediately 
reply: ‘innumerable.’ . . . Generally speaking we found the art 
of music, painting, and sculpture easier learnt than numbers. 
They can all pronounce the numbers in Spanish, but are so 
easily and frequently confused in counting that you must 
be very cautious how you credit what they say in this matter.” 1 
Numeration is an instrument, the need for which they do not 


| \recognize, and the use of which is unfamiliar to them. They 
_do not want numbers, apart from the totals which they can 
\'count so easily in their own way. 


But, we may ask, if this be so, is not the only thing possible 
for primitives to represent these totals and preserve them in 
their memory ? Are not the very simplest additions or sub- 
tractions beyond their powers? Not at all; they can perform 
such operations, for the prelogical mind in this respect (as 
in its language in general) proceeds in a concrete fashion. It 
has recourse to the representation of the movements which 


add units to the original whole or else subtract them from it. 


In this it has an instrument much less effective though more 
complicated than abstract numbers, but which permits it 
to perform the simple operations. It associates a regular 
series of movements and of the parts of the body connected 
with such movements with successive totals in such a way 
as to recall any of these at need by repeating the series from 
the beginning. If it be a case of fixing the day upon which 
a number of tribes are to meet for the common celebration 
of certain ceremonies, it will have to be several months ahead, 
because so much time is needed to tell all who are interested, 
and allow them to reach the spot agreed upon. How do 
the Australian aborigines start about it? “To indicate the 
precise time upon which the people should assemble . . . 
could be done by counting the different stages or camps to 
be made on the journey, or the number of ‘moons.’ If the 
number to be counted was large, recourse was had to the 
various parts of the body, each of which had a recognized 
name, and an understood position in this method of enumera- 
tion. So many parts thus enumerated, counting from the 
little finger of one hand, meant so many stages, or days, or 
months, as the case might require.” (One side of the body 
* Dobrizhoffer, op. cit., ii. pp. 171-2. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 185 


would be gone over, and then the other if necessary.) Howitt 
rightly observes that “ this method of counting fully disposes 
of any belief that the paucity of numerals in the language 
of the Australian tribes arises from any inability to conceive 
of more numbers than two, three, four.’ : 

Whence does this paucity arise, indeed, if not in the habits 
peculiar to the prelogical mind? As a matter of fact, in 
nearly every case in which we note this scarcity of numerals— 
a scarcity which we should consider dependent upon the 
number not being differentiated from that which is being 
enumerated—we find also this concrete method of numbering. 
In the Murray Islands, Torres Straits, ‘‘ the only natives’ 
numerals are metat (1) and meis (2). Any higher numbers 
would be described either by reduplication; e.g. neis-netat 
=2,I1=3; nes neis = 2, 2 = 4, etc., or by reference to 
some_part of the body...By the latter method a total of 31 
could be counted. The counting commenced at the little finger 
of the left hand, thence counting the digits, wrist, elbow, arm- 
pit, shoulder, hollow above the clavicle, thorax, and thence in 
reverse order down the right arm, ending with the little finger 
of the right hand. This gives 21. The toes are then resorted 
to, and these give 10 more.’”’2 “ Dr. Wyatt Gill says: ‘ Any- 
thing above ten the Torres Straits Islanders count visibly,3 
thus: touch each finger, then the wrist, elbow, and shoulder 
joint on the right side of the body; next touch the sternum 
and proceed to the joints of the /e/t, not forgetting the fingers 
of the left hand. This will give 17. If this suffice not, count 
the toes, the ankle, knee, and hip joints (right and left). This 
will give 16 more, the entire process yielding 33. Anything 
beyond can be enumerated only by help of a bundle of 
sticks.’ ’’ 4 

Haddon clearly recognized that there were no numerals, 
nor even numbers properly so called, to be seen, but simply 
a method, an “ aid to memory ” to recall a given total at need. 
“ There was,” he says, ‘‘ another system of counting by com- 


* Howitt, ‘ Australian Message Sticks and Messengers,” J.A.I., xviii. 
PP. 317-19. 

* Hunt, “ Murray Islands, Torres Straits,” J.A.I., xxviii. p. 13. 

3 This is a striking expression, which reminds us of the language of 
primitives, in which verbal utterance seems like a “ tracing’ of visual and 
motor images. 

4 A. Haddon, “ The West Tribes of Torres Straits,” J.4.I., xix. pp. 305-6. 


186 HOW NATIVES THINK © 


mencing at the little finger of the left hand, then following 
on with the fourth finger, middle finger, index, thumb, wrist, 
elbow joint, shoulder, left nipple, and ending with the little 
finger of the right hand (19 in all). The names are simply 
those of the parts of the body themselves and are not numerals. 
In my opinion, this system could only have been used as an 
aid in counting, like using a knotted string, and not as a 
series of actual numbers. The elbow joint (kudu) might be 
either 7 or 13, and I could not discover that kudu really stood 
for either of those numbers, but in a question of trade a man 
would remember how far along his person a former number 
of articles extended, and by beginning again on the left little 
finger he could recover the actual number.” ? 
So, too, in British New Guinea, we find the following system 
used in reckoning : 
I = monou—little finger of the left hand; 
2 = veeve—next finger ; 
= haupu—middle finger ; 

4 = moreere—index ; 

5 = aiva—thumb; 

6 = ankova—wrist ; | 

7 = mirika mako—between wrist and elbow; 

8 = na—elbow; 

9 = ava—shoulder ; 

10 = ano—neck; 

II = ame—left breast; 

12 = unkari—chest ; 

13 = amenekai—right breast ; 

14 = ano—right side of the neck, etc.? 


We notice that the same word, ano, for the neck, either 
on the right or left side, does for 10 and for 14, which would 
be quite impossible if it were a question of numbers and 
numerals. Yet there is no ambiguity here, for it is the naming 
of the parts of the body in a fixed order that eliminates 
confusion. | 

A British scientific expedition to the Torres Straits brought 
to light a certain number of facts which fully confirm the 
preceding. I shall quote but a few of them. At Mabuiag, 
‘counting is usually performed on the fingers, beginning with 
the little finger of the left hand. There was also a system of 


1 “The West Tribes of Torres Straits,’ J.A.J., xix. p. 305. 
2 James Chalmers, ‘‘ Maipua and Namau Numerals,” J.4.1., xxvii. p. 141. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 187 


counting on the body, by commencing at the little finger of 
the left hand: 1. kutadimur (end finger); 2. kutadimur 
gurunguzinga =a thing following the end finger (fourth 
finger) ; 3. a get= middle finger; 4. klak nitui get (index 
finger) = spear-throwing finger; 5. kabaget = paddle finger 
(thumb) ; 6. perta or tiap = wrist; 7. kudu = elbow joint; 
8. zugu kwuick = shoulder ; 9. susu madu = breast flesh, ster- 
num; 10. kosa dadir = right nipple; 11. wadogam susu madu 
= other side breast flesh ; and so on, in reverse order, preceded 
by wadogam (other side) ; the series ending with the little finger 
of the right hand. . . . The names are simply those of parts 
of the body themselves, and are not numerals.” 1 
Manus, a native of the Murray Islands, counted as follows: 
1. kebi ke—little finger ; 
2. kebi ke neis—little finger two; 
3. etp ke—middle finger ; . 
4. baur ke—spear finger (index) ; 
5. au ke—big finger (thumb) ; 
6. kebt kokne—little bone joint (wrist) ; 
7. kebt kokne soy—little bone back (back of the wrist ) ; 
8. au kokne—big bone joint (inner part of the elbow) ; 
9. au kokne sor—bone joint back (elbow) ; 
10. tugar—shoulder ; 
11. kenani—armpit ; 
12. gilid—pit above clavicle ; 
13. nano—left nipple ; 
14. koporv—navel ; 
15. nerhep—top of chest ; 
16. op nerpek—front of throat ; 
17. nerut nano—other nipple ; 
18. nerut gilid ; 
19. nerut kenant, etc., up to 
29. kebi ke nevute—little finger another.? 


In British New Guinea also, counting is accomplished by 
enumerating certain parts of the body, in a way that differs 
slightly from the preceding, but also going back on the right 
side after having begun on the left. ‘‘ This is done in the Elema 
district, I= haruapu, 2 = wrahoka, 3 — iroihu, 4 = han 
(index), 5 = hui (thumb), 6 = aukava (wrist), 7 = farae 
(forearm), 8= ari (elbow), 9 = kae (armlet), 10 = horu 
(shoulder), 11 = kavave (neck), 12 = avako (ear), 13 = ubuhae 


t The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, iii. p. 47. 
2 Ibid., ili, pp. 86-7. 


188 HOW NATIVES THINK 


(eye), 14 = overa (nose), 15 = ubwauka (eye), 16 = avako kar 
(other eye), 17 = karave haukai (neck, other side), etc., etc., 
up to 27, ukai haruapu. . . . In the numbers from I5 onwards, 
kai, ukai, haukai, probably mean other or second.” 

Here is a final example, from a Papuan language spoken 
in the north-east of British New Guinea. ‘‘ According to Sir 
William MacGregor, the practice of counting on the body is 
found in all the lower villages on the Musa river. They begin 
with the little finger of the right hand, use the fingers of that 
side, then proceed by the wrist, elbow, shoulder, ear, and eye 
of that side, thence to the left eye and shoulder, and down the 
left arm and hand to the little finger. Many of them in count- 
ing become greatly confused on reaching the face.””? ‘ Here 
is an example of this method: 1 = anusi (little finger of the 
right hand), 2, 3, 4 = doro (are the ring, middle, and index 
fingers respectively of the right hand), 5 = ube: (thumb), 
6 = tama (right wrist), 7 = unubo (elbow), 8 = visa (shoulder), 
9 = denoro (right ear), 10 = diti (right eye), 11 = dit (left 
eye), 12 = medo (nose), 13 = bee (mouth), 14 = denoro (left 
ear), 15 = visa (left shoulder), 16 = unubo (left elbow), 17 
= tama (left wrist), 18 = uber (thumb), 19, 20, 2I = doro 
(the index, middle, and ring fingers of the left hand), 22 = anust 
(little finger of the left hand).”’ 3 

Here we see very clearly that the terms used are not 
numerals. How could the word doro stand for 2, 3, 4 and 
19, 20, 21 alike, if it were not differentiated by the gesture 
which indicates the special finger of the right or left hand ? 

Such a process admits of the counting to fairly high numbers, 
when the parts of the body enumerated in a fixed order are 
themselves associated with other objects more easily handled. 
Here is an instance taken from the Dayaks of Borneo. It 
was a case of announcing to a certain number of insurgent 
villages which had been conquered, the amount of fine which 
they would have to pay. How would the native messenger 
accomplish his task? ‘‘ He brought a few dry leaves, which 
he tore into pieces; these I exchanged for paper, which 
served better. He arranged each piece separately on a table, 
and used his fingers in counting as well, until he reached 10, 
when he lifted his foot on the table, and took each toe to accord 


: OST PDO 2 Op. cit., p. 364. 3 Ibid. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 189 


with each bit of paper answering to the name of a village, 
name of chief, number of followers, and amount of fine : after 
having finished with his toes, he returned to his fingers again, 
and when my list was completed, I counted forty-five bits 
of paper arranged on the table. He then asked me to repeat 
them once more, which I did, when he went over the pieces, 
his fingers and toes, as before. ‘ Now,’ he said, ‘ this is our 
kind of letter; you white men read differently to us.’ Late 
in the evening he repeated them all correctly, placing his finger 
on each paper, and then said: ‘ Now, if I recollect them 
to-morrow morning it will be all right ; so leave these papers 
on the table,’ after which he mixed them all in a heap. The 
first thing in the morning he and I were at the table, and he 
proceeded to arrange the papers as on the evening before, 
and repeated the particulars with complete accuracy ; and for 
nearly a month after, in going round the villages, far in the 
interior, he never forgot the different amounts, etc’: The 
substitution of pieces of paper for the fingers and toes is 
particularly noteworthy, for it illustrates a clear case of 
abstraction, still really concrete, with which the prelogical 
mind is familiar. 

The inhabitants of Torres Straits, who have very few 
numerals, have ‘‘ a custom of purchasing canoes on the three- 
years-hire system,” and at the end of that period they are 
supposed to have paid for them. This method necessitates 
a fairly complicated method of counting and some elementary 
calculation. Even Australian natives, who have no numeral 
above two, find some way of adding. ‘The Pitta-Pitta 
aboriginal has words for the first two numerals only... . 
Beyond 4, the savage will generally speak of ‘a lot, a large 
number.’ He certainly has visible conceptions of higher 
numbers” (this expression recalls that used by Haddon, 
already quoted), ‘‘ and I have often had a practical demon- 
stration of the fact by asking him to count how many fingers 
and toes he has, and telling him to mark the number in the 
sand. He commences with the hand open, and turns his 
fingers down by two, and for every two he will make a double 
stroke on the sand. ... The strokes he makes... ere 


* Brooke, Ten Years in Sarawak, i. pp. 139-40. | 
2 A. Haddon, ‘The West Tribes of Torres Straits,’ J.A.I. xix. 


PP. 316, 342. 


190 HOW NATIVES THINK 


parallel one beside the other, and when the numeration is 
complete, he calls pakoola (2) for every two of them. This 
method of counting is common throughout the district, and 
often practised by the elders of the tribe to ascertain the number 
of individuals in camp.”’ } 

Without describing concrete numeration so precisely as in 
the cases just cited, it frequently happens that observers allow 
us to perceive it in that which they report. The missionary 
Chalmers, for instance, tells us that ‘‘among the Bugilai of 
British New Guinea, he has found the following numerals : 
I = tarangesa (small finger of the left hand), 2 = meta kina 
(next finger), 3 = guigimeta (middle finger), 4 = topea (next 
to middle), 5 = manda (thumb), 6 = gaben (wrist), 7 = trank- 
gimbe (elbow), 8 = podei (shoulder), 9 = ngama (left breast), 
10 = dala (right breast).”’ 2 

From the facts we have just quoted it is allowable to suppose 
that a more searching observation would have revealed that 
these are names for parts of the body used in concrete numera- 
tion rather than numerals. Moreover, such numeration may 
unconsciously become half-abstract and half-concrete, as the 
names (especially the first five) gradually bring before the 
mind a fainter representation of the parts of the body and a 
stronger idea of a certain number which tends to separate 
itself and become applicable to any object whatever. How- 
ever, nothing proves that numerals are formed thus. The 
contrary seems even to be the rule for the numbers I and 2. 

In the western tribes of Torres Straits, Haddon notes 
names for numbers up to six, and adds: “‘ Beyond that they 
usually say ras or ‘a lot.’ . . . I also obtained at Muralug 
nabiget = 5, nabiget nabiget = 10, nabtkoku = 15, nabikoku 
nabikoku = 20. Get means hand, and 2oko foot.” But he adds: 
‘* Nabiget can hardly be said to be the name of the number 
five, but that there were as many objects referred to as there 
are fingers on one hand.’’3 In other words, the number is 
not yet an abstract one. 

In the Andaman Isles, in spite of the ‘“‘ wealth of formative 
particles, the numerals are limited to i and 2. Three really 


1 W. E. Roth, Ethnological Studies Among the N.W. Central Queensland 
Aborigines, No. 36. (The italics are the author’s.) 

2 James Chalmers, ‘‘ Maipua and Namau Numerals,” J.A.J., xxvii. p. 139. 

3 “‘ The Western Tribes of Torres Straits,” J.4.1., xix. pp. 303-5. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 191 


means ‘one more,’ 4 = some more, 5 = all, and here their 
arithmetic may be said to stop altogether. In some groups, 
however, 6, 7 and perhaps even 10 may be reached by the 
aid of the nose and fingers. First the nose is tapped with 
the little finger of either hand to score I, then with the next 
finger for 2, and so on up to 5, each successive tap being 
accompanied with the word anka (and this). The process is 
then continued with the second hand, after which both hands 
are joined together to indicate 5 + 5, the score being clenched 
with the word ardura (all). But few get as far as this, and 
the process usually breaks down at 6 or 7.”’1 

When it is possible to trace them back to their original 
meaning, numerals proper frequently reveal the existence of 
concrete numeration similar to, if not identical with, that of 
which we have given some instances. But instead of going 
over the different parts of the upper half of the body with an 
ascending movement to return on the other side in descending, 
this concrete enumeration is connected with the movements 
made by the fingers while counting. Thus are produced those 
concepts which Cushing has very aptly called “ manual ’— 
concepts of which he has made an original and exhaustive 
study, and one which we might term experimental, since an 
essential part of his system consisted in recalling the psycho- 
logical condition of the primitives by forcing himself to accom- 
plish exactly the same movements as theirs. Here are the 
“manual concepts ” which serve the Zuñis for counting the 
earlier numbers : 


1 = opinte—taken as a starting-point ; 
2 = kwilli—raised with the preceding one; 
3 = ha’i—the finger which divides equally; 
= awiie—all the fingers raised except one; 
5 = 6pte—the one cut off; 
© = topalik’ya—another added to what is already counted ; 
7 = kwillik’ya—two raised with the rest; 
8 = hailik’ya—three raised with the rest; 
9 = lenalik’ya—all except one raised; 
10 = dstem’thila—all the fingers; 
11 = dstem’th la topayathl’ tona—all the fingers and one more 
raised, etc.? 


t Portland, “‘ The Languages of the South Andaman LEMDES OPA RUES 
PP: 393-5. 
* American Anthropologist, p. 289 (1892). 


192 HOW NATIVES THINK 


In his book entitled The Number Concept, Conant quotes 
similar systems of “manual concepts.” Here is a final 
instance, reported of the Lengua Indians of Chaco in Paraguay : 
“ Thlama (x) and anit (2) are apparently rootwords ; the rest 
appear to depend upon them, and upon the hands. Anta- 
thlama (3) appears to be made by these two words joined ; 
4 = ‘two sides alike,’ and 5 = ‘one hand’; 6 =" arrived at 
the other hand, one’; 7 = ‘arrived at the other hand, two,’ 
and so on. 10 =‘ finished the hands’; 11 = ‘arrived at 
the foot, one’; 16 = ‘arrived at the other foot, one’; 20 
| — ‘finished the feet.’ Beyond that comes ‘ many, and if a 
very large number is required, the ‘hairs of the head’ are 
called into requisition.” ! But we must note that cases vary 
according to the state of development attained. The Zuñis 
count up to a thousand at least, and there is no doubt that 
they have real numerals, although the concrete enumeration 
of former times still appears under these. The Chaco Indians 
of Paraguay, on the other hand, like the Australian aborigines, 
do indeed seem to make use of a regular and constant series 
of concrete terms in which numbers are implied, though not 
yet differentiated. 


II 


It is usually admitted as a natural fact, requiring no 
examination, that numeration starts with the unit, and that 
the different numbers are formed by successive additions of 
units to each of the preceding numbers. This is, in fact, the 
most simple process, and the one which imposes itself upon 
logical thought when it becomes conscious of its functioning. 

Omnibus ex nihilo ducendis sufficit unum. Prelogical 
mentality, however, which has no abstract concepts at com- 
mand, does not proceed thus. It does not distinctly separate 
the number from the objects numbered. That which it 
expresses by speech is not really numbers, but “ number- 
totals,” the units of which it has not previously regarded 
singly. To be able to imagine the arithmetical series of whole 
numbers, in their regular order, starting from the unit, it 
must have separated the number from that which the number 


1 Hawtrey, “ The Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco,” /.4 de 
XXXI. p. 290. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 193 


totals, and this 1s precisely what it does not do. It imagines, 
on the contrary, collections of entities or objects which are 
familiar to it both by nature and by number, the latter being 
felt and perceived, though not conceived in the abstract. 

Accordingly, Haddon says of the western tribes of Torres 
Straits, that ‘‘ they have a decided tendency to count by twos, 
or couples.” And Codrington says: ‘In counting by couples 
in the Duke of York Island they give the couple different 
names, according to the number of them there are. The 
Polynesian way was to use numerals with the understanding 
that so many pairs, not so many single things, was meant ; 
hokorua (20) meant 40 (20 pairs). In this instance, again, 
we might suppose that the natives start with the unit 2; 
agreeing to regard it as equal to 1. But Codrington adds : 
‘In Fiji and the Solomon Islands there are collective nouns 
signifying tens of things very arbitrarily chosen, neither the 
number nor the name of the thing being expressed.’ (This 
is what we have just termed “ number-totals,” perfectly 
definite, but not differentiated.) ‘‘ Thus in Florida na hua 
is ten eggs; na banara, ten baskets of food. ... In Fiji 
bola is a hundred canoes, ovo a hundred coco-nuts, and 
salavo a thousand coco-nuts. . . . In Fiji four canoes in motion 
are 4 waga sagat va, from gai, to run. In Mota two canoes 
sailing together are called aka peperu (butterfly—two canoes), 

from the look of the two sails, etc.” 

| As these ‘‘ number-totals ”’ may be varied indefinitely, 
the prelogical mind will find itself possessed of a very small 
number of numerals, properly so called, and of a surprisingly 
| vast multiplicity of terms in which number is implied. Thus, 
‘in the Melanesian tongues, “when persons or things under 
certain circumstances are reckoned, the numeral is not simply 
used, but is introduced by a word which more or less describes 
the circumstances. If ten men are spoken of regarded as in 
a company together, it would not be o tanun sanaval, but 
0 tanun pul sanaval, pul meaning to be close together; ten 
men in a canoe are tanun sage sanaval ; etc.” ? 

In this respect we have a very noteworthy observation 
regarding the natives of New Pomerania. “ Counting above 
Io was far more trouble to them than our little ones find in 

* Melanesian Languages, pp. 241-2. * Ibid, pp. 304-5. 

13 


194 HOW NATIVES THINK 


‘ once one is one, twice one is two.” They did not use their 
toes. After many attempts, it was found that they do not 
differentiate between 12 and 20; both are called sanaul 
lua, 10 plus 2 as well as 10 multiplied by 2. It is clear 
that they feel no need to distinguish them in speech, for 
they never count in abstract numbers, using numbers only in 
connection with substantives (number-totals): for instance, 
12 coco-nuts, 20 taro roots, a heap of 10 serving as the 
‘unit in the latter case. Then one can see whether it is a 
case of 10 coco-nuts and 2 more, or of 2 heaps of I0.’’! 

Very frequently different names are given to totals com- 
posed of different things, even though the number may be 
the same. Then the languages seem to possess multiple 
lists of numerals; but we must note that the number is 
wholly differentiated. In his very serviceable book, Conant 
has collected a good many facts of this kind, of which I shall 
quote a few only. 

In the Carrier tongue, one of the Déné dialects of Western 
Canada, the word tha means 3 things; thane, 3 persons; 
that, 3 times ; thatoen, in 3 places; thauh, in 3 ways; thatltoh, 
3 things together; thahultoh, the 3 times considered as a 
whole.z In the Tsimshian language of British Columbia, we 
find seven distinct series of numbers used to count different 
classes of objects. The first serves for counting when there 
is no definite object referred to, the second for flat objects 
and animals, the third for round objects and the divisions 
of time, the fourth for men, the fifth for long objects, the 
numbers being combined with the word kan (tree) ; the sixth. 
for canoes, and the seventh for measures. This last seems 
to comprise the word anon (hand). Boas gives a table of the 
first ten numbers in the seven classes (see page 195). 

We shall note that the first class, that of the words which 
are used for counting in general, is almost identical with the 
second, with the exception of a slight difference in r and 8. 
It is therefore allowable to suppose that the first class is not 
formed at the same time as the others, or independently of 
them, but, on the contrary, that there were special numerals 


1 Dr. Stephan, “ Beitrage zur Psychologie der Bewohner von Neu- 
Pommern,”’ Globus, Ixxxviii. p. 206 (1905). | 

2 Morice, The Déné Languages, quoted by Conant in The Number Concept, 
p. 86. 


195 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 




















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juoçopre}4n À 4}e71n0 4 ueYSp9r[},49 [epeorxnÂ Jen À 1e74n4 Jrepuens g 
quooprebds 3 x11ebds 3 ueysrebdo 3 reprebdse 3 J1ebde 3 Jebds 3 Jebdo,3 E 

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JUOTISUOJ0% HSU0079% ueHS3U0J9, [eosus0y 9039 9U079% 9U079X ¢ 
yuorebdyebz xbsdreb} uexsdeebz |  repbdreb} bdreb} bdreb} bdyeb3 v 

jquoopns yueys}es ueysj[es [eqns apn8 quens quens € 

[eqns x31°2dre,s ueysdoes repebds pdno8 zebds 3ebds 3 z 

[2.4 JOeUIe FY UvYSINMe H [e,X [919,8 yes xe48 I | 
90089 ‘syoofqo Suot . re uen} ‘spoofqo punoy | “siofgozenx | ar 








196 


HOW NATIVES THINK 


for certain categories of objects before there were any for 
This is confirmed by an examination of 
the neighbouring languages in British Columbia. The number 
of numeral series there is almost “unlimited.” 
in the Heiltsuk dialect. 


simple counting. 


OBJEcT COUNTED. 


I. 


2e 
maalok 


Here are some 


3e 


animated being menok yutuk 

round object menskam masem yutqsem 

long object ments’ak mats’ak yututs’ak 

flat object menaqsa matlqsa yutqsa 

day op’enequls matlp’enequls yutqp’enequls 
fathom op’enkh matlp’enkh yutqp’enkh 
united — matloutl yutoutl 

group nemtsmots’utl matltsmots’ult yutqtsmots’utl 
full cup mengqtlala matl’aqtlala yutqtlala 
empty cup menqtla matl’aqtla yutqtla 

full box menskamala masemala yutqsemala 
empty box menskam masem yutqsem 
loaded canoe mentsake mats’ake yututs’ake 
canoe and its crew ments’akis mats’akla yututs’akla 
all on the shore — maalis — 

all in the house — maalit] — etc. 


Of the Kwakiutl, Boas says: ‘‘ Besides the class-suffixes 
for animated beings, round, flat, long objects, days, fathoms, 
the numerals may take any of the noun suffixes. . . . The 
number of classes is unlimited. They are simply compounds 
of numerals and the noun-suffixes.””? This is unusual copious- 
ness, but it can be readily understood when we look back 
upon the general character of these languages, which are but 
slightly abstract, and pre-eminently “ pictorial.” It is hardly 
surprising that the numerals do not stand alone. 

This accounts, too, for a peculiarity of the Micmac tongue 
of North America, which Conant pronounces “ extremely 

,noteworthy.” In it, he says, numerals are really verbs 
| instead of being adjectives or, as we occasionally find, nouns, 
They are conjugated in all the divers forms of mood, tense, 
person, and number. For instance, nazooktaich means “‘ there 
is one” (now); naiooktaichcus, ‘there was one” (imperfect) ; 


1 F, Boas, ‘“ The North-western Tribes of Canada,” Report of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Sciences, p. 658 (1890). 
a Ibid., pp. 655-6. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 197 


and encoodaichdedou, ‘there will be one”’ (future). The 
various persons are shown by the following inflections : 


Present. 
Ist person iahboosee-ck we are two 
2nd person tahboosee-yok you are two 
3rd person tahkboo-sisik they are two 
Imperfect. 
Ist person tahboosee-egup we were two 


2nd person tahboosee-yogup you were two 
3rd person  {ahboosee-sibunik they were two 


Future. 
3rd person tahboosee-dak they will be two, etc. 


There is a negative conjugation also: fahboo-seekw, they 
are not two; mah tahboo-seekw, they will not be two; and so 
on, natooki meaning one, and tahboo two. 

Conant explains these forms by saying that the numbers 
are verbs here, and they are being conjugated, But he might 
just as reasonably have said that these verbs are numerals, 
numerative verbs. We who know that primitive languages 
are not divided into parts of speech corresponding exactly 
with our own, and that it is better to consider that they 
contain words “ functioning as verbs,’ although under other 
aspects they may be nouns, adjectives, etc., shall simply say 
that in the case under review, that which we call numerals 
in our languages are here ‘‘ functioning as verbs.” 


It is not only in North America that we find facts of this 
kind. In India, Grierson collected similar instances. Thus 
in the Kuki Chin group of the Tibeto-Burman family of 
languages, ‘‘ the numerals are, in this way, restricted in their 
sphere so as to apply to some special kind of objects.” And 
he reports that these languages show a “‘ tendency to specialize 
and individualize.” 2 For example, in the Rang Khôl tongue, 
the prefix dar is used when the numerals refer to money, 
and dong when they refer to houses.3 These prefixes vary, 


1 Schoolcraft, Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge, v. p. 587, quoted by 
Conant, The Number Concept, p. 160. ; 

2 Linguistic Survey of India, iii. 3, p. 19. 

3 Ibid., iii. 3, p. 184. 


198 HOW NATIVES THINK 


too, with the form of objects: “ fam, which is used for round 
things ; pérr, for loads or bundles. Thus, mat pum kat means 
one pumpkin ; thing porr kat, a load of wood.’’* Sometimes 
there are special prefixes for definite classes of things. ‘“‘ Thus 
sak is used when human beings are counted, ge when inanimate 
things are counted, mang when animals, and bol when trees. 
These nouns are prefixed to the numerals. Mande sak gut 
signifies two men. The prefix ge is also employed in simple 
counting: gé sa, gé gui, gé gitam—1, 2, 3. After 20, these 
particles are added between the tens and the units.” ? In 
the Mikir language of the Naga group of the Tibeto-Burman 
family, generic prefixes are used with numbers, such as— 


With persons  .. ne % Be .. hang 
With animals  .. ey al ORE 
With trees and things siahatis g up ae in. TOME 
With houses or : 3 .. hum 
With flat things . a i is a Or 
With globular things oe pum 
With parts of the body, as APA rings, _ bangles 

and other ornaments .. as hong 


Finally, according to observations quoted by Conant, the 
same multiplicity prevails, ‘to a certain extent,’’ with the 
Aztecs. It is in current use by the Japanese, and Crawfurd 
found fourteen different classes of numbers without exhausting 
the list.3 

According to our view these facts are traceable to the 
general trend of primitive mentality, for as its abstractions 
are always specializing rather than generalizing, it does, at a. 
certain degree of development, form numerals; but they are 
not abstract numbers such as we use. They are invariably 
the number-names of certain classes or persons or things, and 
these classes most frequently depend upon the conformation, 
attitude, position and movement of the objects. Now we 
have already seen how much importance these primitive 
languages accord to everything that expresses the contour and 
the relative position and movement of objects in space. This 
is carried to such a point that it would frequently be possible 
to superpose the detail of that which the words signify, upon 


1 Linguistic Survey of India, iii. 3, p. 118. 
a Abid: il 0, ps Fis 3 The Number Concept, p. 89. 


pÂ 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 199 


the delineation which translates it into a reality for the eyes, 
and the gesture-language which expresses it by movement. 
In this way we can account for a phenomenon which 
occurs fairly frequently, and which is closely connected with 
the preceding. In certain languages numeration consists not 
only of numerals, more or less differentiated, but also of 
auxiliary terms, which are added to certain numbers to mark 
or range the stages of the numeration. English and American 
authors call such terms “ classifiers.’’ ‘‘ These verbs,” says 
Powell, “express methods of counting and relate to form : 
that is, in each case they present the Indian in the act of 
counting objects of a particular form and placing them in 
groups of ten.’”’! Boas has collected many examples of this 
kind among the dialects of British Columbia. They clearly 
show that the function of these auxiliaries is to make visible: 
as it were, the successive stages of the arithmetical process. 
“The appended verbs,’’ says Powell, ‘used as classifiers 
signify to place; but in Indian languages we are not apt to 
find a word so highly differentiated as place, but in its stead 
a series of words with verbs and adverbs undifferentiated, 
each signifying to place with a qualification, as I place DA 
I lay alongside of, I stand up, by, etc.” 
_ Thus these appended verbs are doubly specialized : firstly, 
in that which concerns the movements executed by the subject 
counting, and secondly in respect of the form of the objects 
to be counted. “The verbs serving as classifiers,’ says 
Gatschet, “‘ differ according to the shape of the counted objects, 
but all agree as to their common signification of depositing, 
placing on the top of.’ And he adds: ‘‘ The fact that the 
units from one to nine are not accompanied by these terms 
must be explained by some peculiarity of the aboriginal mode 


of counting. . . . The first ten objects counted (fish, baskets, 
arrows, etc.) were deposited on the ground in a file or row; 
and with the eleventh a new file was commenced : . . or a 
new pile.” 


Moreover, we are told, ‘‘ these appended verbs are not used 
for 10 or for multiples of 10. Such suffixes classify only the 
unit or units following the 10, not Io itself. This detail 


“ The Evolution of Language,” E. B. Rept., i. p. xxi. 
2 mr Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p 534. 


200 HOW NATIVES THINK 


throws light upon their origin and the reason for using them. 
The very number which follows directly after the 10 or its 
multiples, II, 31, 71, 151, etc., is sometimes accompanied 
by other classifiers than the numbers 32 to 39, 72 to 79, etc. ; 
because in the first case it applies to a single object, whilst 
in the others it relates to plurality. When I say 21 fruits— 
lip ni ta unepanta na’sh lutish likla—it literally means: 
above the 20 fruits one is placed on the top. When I say 26 
fruits—ldpéna ta unepanta na’dshkshapta lutish péula—I 
understand: upon the top of twice 10 fruits I place 6 
more. (The words /ékla and péula are only used in speaking, 
of globular objects.) But the 20 fruits which had been pre- 
viously counted are not recalled by the classifier, which relates 
only to the units mentioned by the number. The classifying 
verb may be rendered by the indefinite expression ‘ counted, 
numbered’; and before it the pronoun is omitted, but not 
before its participles Jiklato, péulatko. The simple verbal 
form, absolute or distributive, is used when the person speaking, 
or another person, is about to count the objects: the past 
participle placed in the direct or oblique cases in its absolute 
or distributive forms, is used when the objects have been 
previously counted, or the number is recalled.” It should be 
added that these appended verbs are not always used correctly 
by the Indians, and they often omit them, seeming to per- 
ceive, as Gatschet says, that they are “‘ a useless and cumber- 
some addition.’’ But they are nof an addition at all. Nothing 
favours the belief that the prelogical mind would have been 
more sparing in its counting than in expressing in language 
the sum-totals of its ideas. Its numeration merely presents 
the same quality of minute specialization and “ pictorial ” 
description that we found in the general construction of the 
languages of primitives. 


Codrington made a very careful study of numeration in 
the Melanesian languages. I have already tried to explain 
some of the data which he collected. Here I shall call attention 
to the following fact: the same term may signify different 
numbers successively. Codrington is thinking of what may 
be termed the number-limit, the point at which enumeration 
stops short. ‘A word,” he says, “ which in itself, though 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 201 


we may not be able to trace its original meaning, is used to 
signify the end of the counting, naturally rises as the process 
of counting advances, to the signification of a higher number 
than it expressed at first. Thus in Savo fale or sale is Io, 
which in the Torres Islands = 100; the word, no doubt, is 
the same. As fini may possibly have signified the complete 
numeration as 3 in Mengone, and have advanced to Io in 
Fiji, and even to 10,000 in Maori, so tale may have signified 
the end of counting when no number beyond Io was counted, 
and have retained the meaning of 10 in Savo, while it has 
been advanced, as numeration improved, to signify 100 in 
Torres Islands. ‘Many’ means more in a later generation 
than in an earlier; the Lakona gapra (10) means nothing but 
“many”; tar, which in some languages is vaguely ‘ many,’ 
is in one 100, in several I,000.’’ ! 

Clearly in its original form this number-limit is not a 
number, and the word expressing it is not a numeral either. 
It is a term containing the more or less vague idea of a group 
of objects exceeding the “ number-totals,”’ of which the primi- 
tive’s mind has a clear and familiar intuitive grasp. But as 
numeration advances this term becomes a number, and more- 
over one that increases in value. When at last numeration 
is carried on by means of abstract numbers such as our 
own, the number-series is regarded as indefinite and the 
limiting term ceases to exist. The number is now absolutely 
differentiated from the things numbered, and the processes 
of logical thought supersede the functionings of prelogical 
mentality. 


III 


The result of all that we have just learnt seems to be a 
transformation of the traditional problems and a new method 
of treating them. Conant, for instance, after having collected 
the numerals employed by many primitive peoples in different 
parts of the world, is frankly puzzled by the diversity he 
finds in the numerical systems. Whence have the systems 
in use, differing so widely from each other, derived their 
bases ? How is it that the quinary system—the most natural 


1 Codrington, Melanesian Languages, p. 249. 


202 HOW NATIVES THINK 


of all, and one which would seem to be suggested to, and 
even imposed upon, man as soon as he begins to count— 
has not been universally adopted? What is the reason of 
there being so many binary, quaternary, vigesimal, mixed and 
irregular systems ? Counting on his fingers, would not man 
have inevitably been led to 5 as a basis of reckoning ? Conant 
finds the basic 4, which is met with fairly often, the most 
puzzling of all. It seems incredible to him that men capable 
of counting up to 5 (with the help of their fingers) and 
beyond 5, could have gone back to 4, to make it the 
basis of their numerical system. It is an enigma to which, 
he frankly admits, he has found no clue. 

Yet it is an artificial enigma. In formulating it one has 
to assume that individual minds like our own—that is, func- 
tioning in the same way, and accustomed to the same logical 
processes—have manufactured a system of numeration with 
these processes in view, and that they have been obliged to 


choose for it the basis which was most in accordance with their . 


experience. Now such a supposition is unwarranted. As a 
matter of fact, numerical systems, like the languages from 
which they must not be disjoined, are social phenomena 
which depend upon the collective mentality. In every aggre- 
gate this mentality is strictly dependent upon the type of the 
aggregate and its institutions. In primitive societies the 
mentality is mystic and prelogical; it expresses its thought 
in languages in which abstract concepts, such as we employ, 
are practically unknown. These languages do not possess 
numerals, properly so called, either, or at least, hardly ever. © 
They make use of words “ functioning as numbers,” or else 
they have recourse to ‘‘ number-totals,” concrete representa- 
tions in which the number is still undifferentiated. In short, 
however paradoxical the statement may appear, it is never- 
theless true that for long ages primitive man counted before 
he had any numbers. 

If this be so, how can we regard one special basis of a 
numerical system as more “‘ natural ” than any other? Every 
basis actually adopted has been founded upon the collective 
representations of the social group in which we discover it. 
In the lowest class in which we are able to make observations, 
where the numeration is almost wholly concrete, there is no 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 203 


basis at all, neither is there any numerical system, The 
succession of movements going from the little finger of the 
left hand to the little finger of the right, traversing successively 
the fingers. of the left hand, then ascending the wrist, elbow, 
etc., to descend again in the inverse order on the right side 
of the body, has no one time that is more stressed than any 
other. It does not pause longer on the part of the body 
which corresponds with 2 or 5 or 10 than with any other 
part, for instance. Therefore Haddon is quite right in saying 
that the words pronounced are the names of the parts 
of the body and not the names of numbers. Numerals do 
not appear until a Lo periodicity begins to inform 
the series. 

This periodicity is in fact most frequently regulated by 
the number of fingers and toes : in other words, the quinary 
system is the most usual. It is not yet certain that, wherever 
we meet with it, its origin is that which seems so natural to 
us. Nearly all primitives use their fingers to count with, 
and often too, those who know nothing of the quinary system 
as well as those who use it. On this point the study of the 
‘* manual concepts ”” is very instructive. Here is the method 
of counting by a Dènè-Dindjié in Canada, for instance. 
“Extending the left hand, the palm turned towards his face, 
he bends his little finger, saying, 1; then he bends the ring 
finger, saying 2, and bends the end again. The middle finger 
is bent for 3. He bends the index and says, showing the 
thumb, 4; there are no more but this. Then he opens the 
hand and says 5 ; it is finished with my (or one, or the) hand. 
The Indian, holding his left hand stretched out, three fingers 
of it fastened together, separates the thumb and index, which 
he brings near to the thumb of the right hand and says 6; 
i.e. there are three on each side, three by three. He joins 
four fingers of the left hand, brings the left thumb near the 
thumb and index finger of the right hand, and says 7; (on 
one side there are four, or else, there are still three folded, 
or again, three on each side and the point in the middle). 
He brings the three fingers of the right hand to touch the 
left thumb, and thus obtaining two sections of four fingers, 
he says 8; (four on four, or four on each side). Then showing 
the little finger of the right hand, which alone remains folded, 


204 HOW NATIVES THINK 


he says 9; (there is still one below, or—one is still wanting, 
or—the little finger is lying down). Finally, clapping the 
hands in joining them, the Indian says 10 : i.e. each side is 
finished or, it is counted, reckoned, it is a count. Then he 
begins the same manceuvre once more, saying: one filled 
plus one, one counted plus one, etc.” ! 

Thus the Déné-Dindjié, whilst using his fingers to count 
with, has no idea of a quinary basis. He does not say, as we 
often find in other cases, 6 is a second one; 7 is a second 
two; 8 is a second three, etc. On the contrary, he says: 
6 is 3 + 3, coming back to the hand whose fingers he has 
exhausted, and separating them to add two to the thumb 
of the other hand. This proves that in counting 5, in 
“finishing a hand,’ he has not marked any time more 
strongly than in counting 4 or 6. Therefore in this case 
and in the many others which resemble it, it is not in the 
method of counting itself, it is not in the movements accom- 
plished that we find the principle of periodicity, that is, that | 
which will be the basis of the numerical system. 

A basis may be imposed for reasons which have absolutely 
nothing to do with convenience in reckoning, and the idea of 
the arithmetical use of numbers may not enter the question 
at all. Prelogical mentality is mystic, and oriented differ- 
ently from our own. Accordingly it is often indifferent to 
the most evident objective qualities, and contrariwise con- 
cerned with the mysterious and secret properties of all kinds 
' of entities. For instance, it may happen that the basic 4, 
and the quaternary system of numeration, arise out of the 
fact of the four cardinal points and the four winds, of the 
|! four colours and four animals, etc., which participate in these 
four points, and play an important part in the collective 
representations of the peoples under consideration. Therefore 
we do not need to tax our psychological insight in speculating 
why this basis should have been chosen by men who never- 
theless reckoned with their five fingers. Where we find it 
used, it has not been selected from choice. It, as well as 
numbers, had a pre-existence, in that long period when they 
were as yet undifferentiated, and when the “‘ number-totals ” 
took the place of numeration proper. It is a mistake to picture 

1 Petitot, Dictionnaire de la Langue Dènè-dindjié, p. lv. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 205 


the human mind making numbers for itself in order to count, 
for on the contrary men first of all counted, with much effort 
and toil, before they conceived of numbers as such. 


IV 


When the numbers have names given to them, and a 
group has a numerical system at command, it does not follow 
that the numbers are ipso facto conceived abstractly. On 
the contrary, they usually remain connected with the idea 
of the objects most frequently counted. The Yorubas, for 
instance, have a somewhat noteworthy numerical system, to 
judge by the use of subtraction in it. 


T1 112,113. 14, 15 = 10 1, +2, 49, 4) ts: 
16, 17, 18, 19 = 20 — 4, — 3, — 2, —1; 
70 = 20 X 4 — 10; 
130 = 20 X 7 — 10, etc. 


This phenomenon is explained by the Yorubas’ constant 
use of cowrie shells as money, and these are always arranged 
in parcels of 5, 20, 200, etc. ‘‘ Numerals,” says the observer 
who has noted this fact, ‘‘convey to the Yoruba ear and 
mind two meanings: (x) the number, and (2) the thing the 
Yorubas especially count, and this is money (shells). . 
Other objects are only counted in comparison with an equal 
number of cowries, for a nation without literature and without | 
a school knows nothing of abstract numbers’?! This con-. 
clusion is equally true of all social groups of the same level | 
of development. The number, despite its being named; still 
adheres more or less to the concrete representation of a certain 
class of objects which are, par excellence, the objects counted, 
and other objects are counted only, as it were, by super- 
position on these. 

But while admitting that this adherence yields by degrees, 
and numbers unconsciously come to be represented for them- 
selves, this does not yet occur in a way that is abstract, and 
it is precisely because each has its name. With primitive 


* Mann, “ On the Numeral System of the Yoruba Nation,” J.A.I., xvi. 
Ol: 


206 HOW NATIVES THINK 


peoples nothing, or at any rate, scarcely anything, is perceived 
in the way that seems natural to us. To their minds there is 
no physical phenomenon which is purely a phenomenon, 
no image which is nothing but an image, nor form that is 
wholly form. Everything perceived is compassed about by a 
complexity of collective representations in which the mystic 
elements predominate. In like manner, there is no name 
which is purely and simply a name; neither is there any 
numeral which is nothing but a numeral. Let us disregard 
the practical use the primitive makes of numbers when, for 
instance, he reckons what is due for so many hours’ work, or 
how many fish he has caught on a certain day. Every time 
he imagines a number gua number, he necessarily pictures 
it with the mystic property and value appertaining to that 
number, and to it alone, by virtue of participations which are 
equally mystic. The number and its name are indifferently 
the vehicle of these participations. 

Thus each number has its own individual physiognomy, a 
kind of mystic atmosphere, a “ field of action ” peculiar to 
itself. Every number, therefore, is imagined—we might also 
say, felt—especially for itself, and without comparison with 
the others. From this standpoint numbers do not constitute 
a homogeneous series, and they are accordingly quite unsuited 
to the simplest logical or mathematical operations. The 
mystic personality contained in each makes them unable to 
be added, subtracted, multiplied or divided. The only pro- 
cesses they admit of are themselves mystic processes and not, 
like arithmetical operations, subject to the law of contra- 
diction. In short, we might say that in the primitive’s mind 
from two standpoints, number is undifferentiated, to a varying 
extent. In its practical use it still more or less adheres to 
the objects counted. In the collective representations the 
number and its name still participate so closely in the mystic 
qualities of the ensembles represented that they are indeed 
mystic realities themselves, rather than arithmetical units. 

It is to be noted that the numbers which are thus enveloped 
in a mystic atmosphere hardly exceed the first ten. They are 
the only numbers known to primitive peoples, and to which 
they have given a name. In peoples who have risen to an 
abstract conception of number, the value and mystic power 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 207 


of numbers may indeed be preserved for a very long time, 
when it is a case of those which formed part of the very 
earliest collective representations: but they are not extended 
to their multiples, nor as a rule to the higher numbers. The 
reason for this is evident. The earlier numbers, to about 
ten or twelve, which are familiar to the prelogical, mystic, 
mentality, participate in its nature, and become purely arithme- 
tical numbers at a very late epoch. Possibly there is not even 
yet any aggregate in which they bear that aspect alone, save 
to mathematicians. On the contrary, the higher numbers, 
very slightly differentiated in the primitive’s mind, have 
never, with their names, been merged in its collective repre- 
sentations. They at once became arithmetical numbers and, 
with some exceptions, they have been nothing else. 

This limits the extent to which I subscribe to the conclu- 
sions reached in Usener’s fine book entitled Dreiheit (or 
Trinity).t After having adduced exhaustive evidence estab- 
lishing the mystical nature of the number three, and the 
mysterious. value and power attributed to it from remote 
antiquity, Usener accounts for it by concluding, as Diels 
does, that this mystic character had its origin in times when 
human societies counted no further than three. Three, 
then, would have signified the ultimate number, the absolute 
total, and thus for a long period it would have held the place 
given to infinity in more advanced aggregates. It is un- 
doubtedly possible that with certain primitive races the number 
three may have enjoyed such prestige, but Usener’s inter- 
pretation cannot be accepted as entirely satisfactory. As a 
matter of fact, in the first place, we do not find that numeration 
actually stops short at three anywhere. Even in the social 
groups inhabiting Australia, Torres Straits, and New Guinea, 
who have no numerals above one, two and occasionally three, 
prelogical mentality has methods of its own which permit 
of counting more than this. Nowhere is three the “ ultimate ”’ 
number. Moreover, the list of numbers named or used never 
stops short at a certain number which is distinctly the last, 
and expresses totality. On the contrary, all the data collected, 
not only in the primitive races just mentioned, but in Melanesia 
and both the Americas, as well as among the Dravidians 

™ Rheinisches Museum, N.F., lviii. pp. 1-48, 161-208, 324-364. 


208 HOW NATIVES THINK 


of India, etc., prove that the number-series always terminates 
in a vague term meaning ‘“ many” or “ plenty,” or “ multi- 
tude,” which afterwards becomes a definite numeral—five, 
six, or whateverit may be. Finally, as Mauss rightly observes," 
if Usener’s theory were correct—-if, for many centuries, the 
human mind, stopping short at the number three, had impressed 
an almost indelible character of mysticism upon it, such a 
character would pertain to the number in all social groups 
everywhere. Now there is nothing of this sort with the peoples 
of North and Central America. The numbers four and five, 
and the multiples of these, are constantly met with in their 
group ideas, and the number three plays a very insignificant 
part, or none at all. 

These objections are not only effective against Usener’s 
theory, but at the same time they overthrow all similar 
attempts at interpretation. The otherwise extremely ingenious 
theory of MacGee,? for instance, which is based on the observa- 
tion of North American natives, cannot account for data 
which have been collected among other primitive peoples. — 
The common mistake of all such hypotheses is that of general- 
izing from a psychological process which their advocates believe 
they have analysed in this or that milieu, and which serves” 
to account for the mystic worth attributed to certain numbers 
in these social groups. Facts do not bear out this generaliza- 
tion, and this sort of ‘“‘ explanation’’ leads nowhere. Must 
we not rather regard the collective representations of primitive 
races as prelogical and mystic by virtue of their constitution 
and their mental solidarity, and is not this true of the numbers 
they imply as well as of their other content ? There is no 
number which possesses a name and appears in their repre- 
sentations which has not a mystic value. That being granted, 
why should it be here the three, or there the four, or elsewhere 
the two or seven or any other number, which assumes a 
special importance and has a wholly individual virtue? The 
reason must be sought, not in purely psychological motive, for 
these would apply to all human aggregates, whatever their 
nature, but in the conditions peculiar to the group or col- 
lection of groups under consideration. In this respect there 


1 Année Sociologique, vol. vii. p. 310 (1904). 
2 “ Primitive Numbers,” E. B. Rept., xix. pp. 821-51. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 209 


is nothing more instructive than the facts revealed by Dennett 
in his book entitled At the Back of the Black Man’s Mind. 

The classification of the various types of social groups 
is not yet advanced enough to provide the guiding thread 
we need here. But what we can even now establish is that 
there is no number among the first ten that does not possess 
supreme mystic importance for some social group or other. 
It is quite unnecessary to bring forward evidence of this, as 
far as the first three numbers are concerned. Even among 
the most advanced nations, there are traces of this mystic 
character still discernible both in religion and metaphysics. 
The “ unit ’’ has maintained a prestige upon which the mono- 
theistic religions and the monistic philosophies plume them- 
selves. ‘“‘ Duality” is often the antithesis of unity by 
qualities which are diametrically opposite, since it signifies, 
implies, and produces the exact contrary of that which unity 
signifies, implies and produces. Where unity is a principle of 
good, order, perfection and happiness, duality is a principle 
of evil, disorder, imperfection ; a sign, that is, a cause, of 
misfortune. Many languages still preserve in their vocabulary 
traces of this opposition ; and we speak of “a double life,” 
“duplicity,”” etc. I shall not lay further stress upon the 
mystic character of the number three: it is sufficient to 
remind you of Usener’s monograph on the subject, mentioned 
above. I will confine myself to recalling some facts relative 
to the number four and those which follow it. 

These facts, naturally, cannot be ascertained among the 
most primitive peoples we know, for such have not yet given 
names to the number four and those above it. The majority 
of the Indian groups of North America, however, attach to 
the number four a mystic virtue that surpasses that of any 
other. “ Amongst almost all the Red Indian tribes, four and 
its multiples had a sacred significance, having special reference 
to the cardinal points and to the winds which blow from them, 
the sign and symbol of this quadruple nature-worship being 
the Greek or equal-armed cross.”3 In the great Navajo 
epic, “‘ the gods are all four in number, and all range them- 


* London, 1906. 
> MacGee, “‘ Primitive Numbers,” E. B. Rept., xix. pp. 821-51. 
3 Buckland, ‘ Four as a Sacred Number,” J.A.I., xxv. pp. 96-9. 


I4 


210 HOW NATIVES THINK 


selves one at each cardinal point, being painted in the colour 
appropriate to that point. There are four bear gods, four 
porcupines, four squirrels, four long-bodied goddesses, four 
holy young men, four lightning birds, etc. The hero is allowed 
four days and four nights to tell his story, and four days are 
employed in his purification.” So, too, we constantly find 
evidence of the mystic functioning of the number four in the 
Zuñi myths which Cushing has so admirably annotated for 
us, as well as in their rites and customs, as described by Mrs. 
Stevenson. ‘‘ Choose then, four youths, so young that they 
have neither known nor sinned aught of the flesh... 
Them four ye shall accompany. . . . Ye shall walk about the 
shrine four times, once for each region and the breath and 
season thereof. ... They carried the painted arrows of 
destiny, like the regions of men, four in number.’’? Among the 
Sioux, ‘‘ Takuskanskan, the moving deity, is supposed to live 
in the four winds, and the four black spirits of night do his 
bidding. .. . The four winds are sent by the ‘something 
that moves.’’’2? Again, with them there are four thunder- 
beings, or at any rate, ‘‘ four varieties of their external mani- 
festation. In essence, however, they are but one.” (In this 
we recognize the effect of the law of participation.) ‘‘ One is 
black, another yellow, scarlet, blue, etc. They live at the 
end of the world upon a high mountain. The dwelling opens 
towards each of the four quarters of the earth, and at each 
doorway is stationed a sentinel: a butterfly at the entrance, 
a bear at the west, a deer north, and a beaver south.”’ 3 

It is nowadays the fashion to give a psychological inter- 
pretation to facts of this kind, which are innumerable. An 
association between the number four and the cardinal points 
which are exactly four, the winds coming from these four 
regions, the four gods presiding over them, the four sacred 
animals which dwell there, and the four colours symbolizing 
them, is supposed to have been set up. The prelogical mind, 
however, was never conversant with these as isolated ideas. 
It did not first of all conceive of the north as a spatial region 
having the east on the right and the west on the left, and 


1 F, H. Cushing, ‘‘ Zufii Creation Myths,”’ E. B. Rept., xiii. p. 442. 
2 Dorsey, “ Siouan Cults,” E. B. Rept., xi. p. 446. 
3 Dorsey, ibid., p. 442. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 211 


then combine with it the idea of a cold wind, snow, the bear, 
the colour blue. . . . All such ideas on the contrary were 
originally enveloped in a complex representation which is 
of a collective and religious nature, in which the mystic ele- 
ments conceal those which we should consider the real ones. 
As one such element we find the number four, the vehicle on 
mystic participation, playing in this way a very important 
part, and one which, though indispensable to the prelogical 
mind, is very difficult for logical thought to reconstruct. When 
mystic participations are no longer felt, they leave behind, 
as it were, a residuum composed of these associations which 
still obtain to some extent everywhere. They are no longer 
anything but associations, because the internal bond which 
held them together has disappeared: but they were originally 
something very different. Such, for instance, are the asso- 
ciative correlation between cardinal points, seasons, colours, 
etc., so frequently met with in China. De Groot gives us the 
following : 


East Spring Blue Dragon 
South Summer Red Bird 
West Autumn White Tiger 
North Winter Black Tortoise ! 


The mystic participation realized by means of the number 
four in the minds of the North American tribes, is brought 
* out in many instances. Catlin tells us that with the Mandans 
“there were also four articles of great veneration and im- 
portance lying on the floor of the lodge, which were sacks 
containing in each some three or four gallons of water . . 
objects of superstitious regard, made with great labour and 
much ingenuity; . . . sewed in the form of a large tortoise 
lying on its back, with a bunch of eagle’s quill appended to 
itasa tail. . . . These four sacks of water have the appearance 
of great antiquity, and by inquiring . . . the medicine-man 
very gravely told me that ‘ those four tortoises contained the 
waters from the four quarters of the world—that those waters 
had been contained therein since the settling down of the 
world,” an explanation which amused Catlin very much. 
He tells us, too, that the buffalo dance (intended to oblige 


1 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. p. 317. 


212 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the buffaloes to come near the hunters) is repeated four times 
during the first day, eight on the second day, twelve on the 
third and sixteen on the fourth day, and that the dance is 
given once to each of the cardinal points, and the medicine-man 
smokes his pipe in those directions. On the second day it 
is given twice to each, three times on the third day, and four 
times on the fourth.! 

We note the same mystic character attributed to the 
number four in the magic formulas of the Cherokees. Mooney 
lays considerable stress upon this. ‘The Indian,” he says, 
‘has always four as the principal sacred number, with usually 
another only slightly subordinated. The two sacred numbers 
of the Cherokees are four and seven. . . . The sacred four 
has direct relation to the four cardinal points, while seven, 
besides these, includes also ‘above,’ ‘ below,’ and ‘here, in 
the centre.’ In many tribal rituals, colour and sometimes 
sex are assigned to each point of direction. In the sacred 
Cherokee formulas the spirits of the East, South, West and 
North are respectively Red, White, Black and Blue, and its 
colour has also its symbolic meaning of Power (War), Peace, 
Death and Defeat.’”’2 Mooney speaks too of “the veneration 
which their physicians have for the numbers four and seven. 
They say that after man was placed upon the earth four and 
seven nights were instituted for the cure of diseases in the 
human body. . . .” 3 

In British Columbia, with the StatlumH tribe, four is 
par excellence the sacred number. After birth “ the mother 
and child remained in the lodge for at least four days, and if 
the weather permitted, this period would be extended to eight 
or twelve or twenty days, or to some other multiple of four, 
the Salish mystic number.” 4 In Vancouver, during the 
initiation ceremonies of the medicine-man, ‘‘ when he rises, 
he must turn round four times, turning to the left. Then he 
must put forward his foot four times before actually making 
a step. In the same way, he has to make four steps before 


t The North American Indians, i. pp. 185-6. 

a ‘‘ Myths of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., xix. P. 431. 

3 Heywood, quoted by J. Mooney, “* The Sacred Formulas of the Chero- 
kee,” E. B. Rept., vii. p. 322. 

4 Hill Tout, ‘‘ The Ethnology of the StatlumH of British Columbia,” 
J.A.I.,, XXXV. p. 140. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 213 


going out of the door. . . . He must use a kettle, dish, spoon 
and cup of his own, which are thrown away at the end of four 
months. . . . He must not take more than four mouthfuls at 
one time, etc.’ ! 

This same number four appears to form the basis of the 
complicated and obscure mysticism of numbers which became 
manifest in the southern and western parts of North America, 
and in Central America. ‘The nine days of ceremony... . 
have a nomenclature suggestive of divisions into two groups 
of four each. . . . On this basis it will be seen that the number 
four, so constant in Pueblo ritual, is prominent in the number 
of days in the Snake ceremonial. I will call attention also 
to the fact that the nine days of ceremonies plus the four 
days of frolic make the mystic number thirteen. It may 
likewise be borne in mind that the period of twenty days, 
the theoretical length of the mo:t elaborate Tusayan ceremony, 
was also characteristic of other more cultured peoples in Mexico, 
and that thirteen ceremonials, each twenty days long, make a 
year of 260 days, a ceremonial epoch of the Maya and related 
peoples.””2 I shall not enter into a discussion of this com- 
plicated question, but am content to have pointed out the 
significant place occupied by the number four, as we find it 
again in the Agrarian rites of the Cherokees.3 Lastly, I 
shall quote a remark made by Hewitt, apropos of an Iroquois 
myth, in which four children—two boys and two girls—are 
mentioned. ‘The use of the number four is here remarkable. 
It seems that the two female children are introduced merely 
to retain the number four, since they do not take any part 
in the events of the legend.”’ 4 

The mystic number thus assumes the aspect of a category 
in which the content of the collective representations must be 
arranged. This is a feature which is found, well marked, in 
the Far East. ‘European languages,” says Chamberlain, 
“have such expressions as ‘the four cardinal virtues’ or 
‘the seven deadly sins’; but it is no part of our mental dis- 
position to divide up and parcel out almost all things visible 

* F. Boas, “‘ The North-west Tribes of Canada,” Reports of the British 
Association, p. 618 (1890). 

2 Fewkes, “ Tusayan Snake Ceremonies,’ E. B. Rept., xvi. p. 275. 


3 J. Mooney, “ Myths of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., xix. p. 423. 
+ Hewitt, “ Iroquoian Cosmology,” E. B. Rept., xxi. p. 233 (note). 


214 HOW NATIVES THINK 


and invisible into numerical categories fixed by unchanging 
custom, as is the case among the natives from India east- 
wards.” In North America this “‘ category’’ seems very 
closely bound up with the cardinal points or the spatial regions. 
We must not imagine, however, that prelogical mentality 
imagines these points or regions in any abstract way, and that 
it detaches the number four from its idea of these, for its 
mystic purposes. In this, as in all else, such a mentality 
obeys the law of participation ; it imagines spatial directions, 
cardinal points and their number only in a mystic complex 
to which the number four owes its categorical character, which 
is not logical, but mystic. ‘The breath-clouds of the gods 
are tinted with the yellow of the North, the blue-green of the 
West, the red of South, and the silver of the East.” 2 

This complex naturally contains elements which are of 
social origin. The division of space into regions corresponds 
with the division of the tribe into groups. Durkheim and 
Mauss opine that the latter determine the former, and that 
it is the general principle of what they call classifications.3 
They quote facts observed in Australia especially, but also 
in China, and from the Pueblos of North America, particularly 
the Zuñis. I have already laid stress upon that which Spencer 
and Gillen term ‘“ local relationship,” kinship by community 
of position, and participation between a group and a given 
region. When a tribe stays in a place, for instance, whether 
its stay be provisional or permanent, the different clans or 
totems do not take up their positions at their own discretion. 
Each has its predetermined site, settled by virtue of the 
mystic connection between the clans or totems and the points 
of the compass. We have found that facts of the same kind _ 
were noted in North America, and other observations made 
betoken this mystic connection. The Kansa, for instance, 
as Dorsey tells us, were accustomed to cut out the heart of 
an enemy they had killed, and throw it on the fire as a sacrifice 
to the four winds. The Yata men, i.e. those who camped 
on the left side of the tribal circle, would raise their left hands, 
and bow to the east, south, west, and north winds succes- 


1 Things Japanese, pp. 353-4. 
2 Stevenson, ‘‘ The Zufiis,”’ E. B. Rept, xxiii. p. 23. 
3 Année Soctologique, vi. pp. I-72. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 215 


sively.t The ritual order is regulated by the mystic tie which 
unites the clans with the position in space which they occupy, 
and Dorsey further says that every time the Osage and Kansa 
tribes permanently established themselves in a village, there 
was a certain consecration of the dwellings, before the people 
could install their belongings, and this was associated with the 
cult of the four winds. ‘The symbol of the earth, U-ma-ne, 
in Dakota, has never been absent from any religious exercise 
I have yet seen or learned of from the Indians. It is a mellowed 
earth space, and represents the unappropriated life or power 
of the earth. . . . The square or oblong, with the four lines 
standing out, is invariably interpreted to mean the earth or 
land with the four winds standing towards it. The cross, 
whether diagonal or upright, always symbolizes the four 
winds or four quarters.”’ 2 


The numbers five, six and seven also sometimes possess 
a sacred character among the North American tribes, although 
not so constantly so as the number four. Gatschet writes, 
for instance: “ Here we have again the sacred number five 
occurring so often in the traditions, myths and customs of 
the Oregonian tribes.” 3 ‘‘ Many of the deified animals appear 
collectively, as five to ten brothers, or five sisters, sometimes 
with their old parents.” 4 The number of cardinal points or 
spatial regions is not necessarily four ; with the North American 
tribes it is sometimes five (reckoning the zenith), six (then 
adding the nadir), and lastly seven, terminating in the centre 
or the place occupied by the one counting. With the Mandans, 
for instance, the medicine-man “took the pipe, and after 
presenting the stem to the North, to the South, to the East 
and the West—and then to the sun that was over his head 
. . 5—With the Sia, “the priest, standing before the altar 
shook his rattle for a moment, and then waved it in a circle 
over the altar. He repeated this motion six times, for the 
cardinal points. . . . The circle indicated that all the cloud 
people of the world were invoked to water the earth. . . 


t Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,’’ E. B. Rept., xi. p. 380. 
2 Tbid.,) p. 451. 

3 The Klamath Language, p. 86. 

4 Ibid., p. ror. 

§ 


Catlin, The North American Indians, i. p. 258. 


216 HOW NATIVES THINK 


This sprinkling of the cardinal points was repeated four times.”’ ! 
—‘‘ The Omahaand Ponka used to hold the pipe in six directions 
while smoking towards the four winds, the ground, and the 
upper world.” »—‘‘ The snake chief made a circle of sacred 
meal about twenty feet in diameter . . . and drew in it six 
meal radii corresponding to the six cardinal points.’ 3 Finally, 
among the Cherokees, the sacred number four signifies the 
cardinal points, and the sacred seven signifies them also, by 
adding the zenith, nadir and centre.4 

We find these numbers five, six and seven, involved in the 
same complex mystic participations as the number four. 
Among the Zuñis, Mrs. Stevenson has collected several examples 
relating to six. To quote but one of them, “ these primitive 
agriculturists have observed the greatest care in developing 
colour in corn and beans to harmonize with the six regions : 
yellow North, blue West, red South, white East, variegated 
zenith, and black nadir.’’ 5 

Similar phenomena are to be found throughout the Far 
East, to say nothing of the Indo-European and Semitic peoples. 
In China the complexity of correspondences and participations 
involving numbers is infinite. They intersect and even con- 
tradict each other without the Chinese sense of logic being 
at all disturbed. In Java the native week lasts five days, 
and the Javanese believe that the names of these days bear 
a mystical relation to colours and to the divisions of the 


horizon. ‘The 1 means white and East ; the 2, red and South ; 
the 3, yellow and West; the 4, black and North; the 5, 
mixed colour and forms the centre. . . . In an ancient manu- 


script found in Java, the week of five days is represented by 
five human figures, two female and three male.” 6 In India 
the number five is lucky or formidable, according to the 
district, or according to the special participation concerned. 
“In 1817 a terrible epidemic of cholera broke out at Jessore. 
The disease commenced its ravages in August, and it was at 
once discovered that the August of this year had five Saturdays 


s Stevenson, “ The Sia,” E. B. Repi., xi. pp. 79, 93. 

2 Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,’’ E. B. Rept., xi. p. 375. 

3 Fewkes, ‘‘ Tusayan Snake Ceremonies,” E. B. Rept., xvi. pp. 285, 295. 
¢ J. Mooney, ‘‘ Myths of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., xix. p. 431. 

5 Stevenson, “ The Zufiis,”’’ E. B. Rept., xxiii. p. 350. 

6 Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 545 (note). 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 217 


(a day under the influence of the ill-omened Sani). The 
number five being the express property of the destructive 
Siva, a mystical connection was at once detected, the infallibly 
baleful influence of which it would have been sacrilege to 
question.” In another place the number five possesses 
favourable powers. ‘‘ The peasant digs up five clods of earth 
with his spade. This is a lucky number, as it is a quarter 
more than four. . .. He then sprinkles water five times 
into the trench with the branch of the sacred mango... . 
Then a selected man ploughs five furrows. . . . In Mirzapur, 
only the northern part of the field, that facing the Himalaya, 
is dug up in five places with a piece of mango wood.” 2 Agra- 
rian rites and practices of this nature occur very frequently. 
There are peculiarly important mystic virtues attaching 
to the number seven, especially in places where the in- 
fluence of Chinese or Assyro-Babylonian beliefs obtains.3 In 
Malaya, ‘every man is supposed . . . to possess seven souls 
in all, or perhaps, I should more accurately say, a sevenfold 
soul. This ‘septenity in unity’ may perhaps be held to 
explain the remarkable importance and persistence of the 
number seven in Malay magic (seven twigs of the birch, seven 
repetitions of the charm in soul abduction, seven betel leaves, 
seven blows administered to the soul, seven ears cut for the 
Rice soul in reaping).’”’4 The animism which inspires Skeat’s 
work evidently suggests this theory: I incline to think 
that it presents the matter the wrong way round. It is not 
because they conceive of seven souls or a sevenfold soul for 
every one that the Malays use seven everywhere. It is on 
the contrary because the number seven possesses magic virtues 
on their eyes that it becomes a kind of “category,” upon 
which not only their magic practices, but also their ideas, not 
excepting their conception of the soul, are regulated. This 
is so true that Skeat himself adds’: ‘‘ What these seven souls 
were it is impossible without more evidence to determine.”’ 
If each of the seven souls is so little differentiated that we may 


* Crooke, The Folklore of Northern India,” i. p. 130. 

a Ibid., ii. p. 288. 

3 Vide Von Adrian, ‘‘ Die Siebenzahl im Geistesleben der Volker,’’ Mitteil- 
ungen, pp. 225-271 (Vienna, 1901).; W. H. Roscher, ‘ Die Siebenzahl,”’ 
Philologus, pp. 360-74 (1901). 

4 Skeat, Malay Magic, pp. 50, 509. 


218 HOW NATIVES THINK 


speak equally well of one sevenfold soul, it is difficult to admit 
that the value attached to the number seven in general has 
its origin in this idea. 

‘When Hindus have removed the ashes from a burning- 
ground they write the figures 49 on the spot where the corpse — 
was cremated. The Pandits explain this by saying that when 
written in Hindi the figures resemble the conch-shell or wheel 
of Vishnu ; or that it is an invocation to the 49 winds of heaven 
to come and purify the ground. It is more probably based on 
the idea that the number seven, as is the case all over the world, 
has some mystic application.” —“‘ In India, the water of seven 
wells is collected on the night . . . of the feast of lamps, 
and barren women bathe in it as a means of procuring children. 
. . . Hydrophobia, all over Northern India, is cured by 
looking down seven wells in succession.’’ 2—‘‘ The goddess of 
smallpox, Sitala, is only the eldest of a band of seven sisters 
by whom the pustular group of diseases is supposed to be 
caused. . . . Similarly in the older Indian mythology we 
have the seven mâtris, the seven oceans, the seven Rishis, 
the seven Adityas, and Danavas, and the seven horses of the 
sun, and numerous other combinations of this mystic num- 
ber.’’ 3—In Japan, ‘‘ seven, and all the numbers into which 
seven enters (seventeen, twenty-seven, etc.), are unlucky.” 4 
It is the same with the Assyro-Babylonian people, who consider 
the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth 
days ill-omened.s—Among the Hindus, medical prescriptions, 
like all magic formulas in general, attach the greatest import- 
ance to numbers on account of their mystic virtues. For 
example, ‘one favourite talisman is the magic square, 
which consists in an arrangement of certain numbers in a 
special way. In order to cure barrenness, for instance, it is 
a good plan to write a series of numbers which added up 
make 73 both ways, on a piece of bread, and with it feed a 
black dog. . . . To cure a tumour a figure in the form of a 
cross is drawn, with three cyphers in the centre and one at 
each of the four ends. This is prepared on a Sunday and 
tied round the left arm. The number of these charms is 

t Crooke, The Folklore of Northern India, ii. p. 51. 
2 Ibid., i. pp. 50-1. 3 Ibid., 1. ‘p.' 2318, 


4 Chamberlain, Things Japanese, p. 439. 
5 Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 377. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 219 


legion,’ * adds Crooke; but it is not only in India that this 
is so. An infinite number of similar ones can be found in 
the magic and medicine of antiquity in Arabia and in the 
Middle Ages, in Europe and among all peoples who have 
numerals at command. The study of folk-lore affords abun- 
dant evidence of this. 

Among more developed peoples, with whom large numbers 
are of current usage, certain multiples of numbers of mystic 
value participate in their peculiar properties. In India, for 
instance, ‘ when the new moon falls on Monday, pious Hindus 
walk one hundred and eight times round it (the fig-tree).”’ 2 
Possibly 108 possesses special virtue as a common multiple 
of 9 and 12, themselves multiples of 3 and 6. In the North- 
west Provinces, the numbers 84 and 360 are of extraordinary 
importance. Chaurasi (84), for instance, is the subdivision 
of a parganah or district, amounting to 84 villages. ‘‘ But it 
is not with respect to the occupation of land only that the 
numbers 84 and 360 are regarded with such favour. We 
find them entering into the whole scheme of the Hindi, Buddhist 
and Jain religions, cosmogonies, rituals, and legendary tales ; 
so much so, as to show that they are not taken by mere chance, 
as arbitrary numbers to fill up some of their extravagant 
fictions, but with a designed purpose of veiling a remote 
allusion under a type of ordinary character.” 3 The use of 
such mystic numbers is more systematic with the Buddhists 
than with the Hindus. 

May not this arise out of the fact that 84 is a multiple nt 
both 7 and 12; and 360 a multiple of 4,6,9,5 and12? There 
would thus be a combination in 84 and 360, in which all the 
properties of the respective numbers would participate. 

On several occasions Bergaigne has laid stress upon the 
nature of the mystic numbers in Vedic poetry, and the 
mystic processes applied to these. Multiplication seems to 
be effected chiefly by applying to the different parts of a whole 
a system of division first applied to itself. For instance, 
the division of the universe into three—heaven, earth, and 
atmosphere—may be repeated for each of these three— 


t Crooke, op. cit., i. pp. 159 —60. 2 Ibid., p. 100. 
3 Elliot, Memoirs. of the Races in the North- west PAN of India, ii. 


pp. 47 et seq. 


220 HOW NATIVES THINK 


three heavens, three earths, and three atmospheres—that is, 
nine worlds in all. Then, too, various systems of division 
having been applied to the universe, the figures given by two 
of them may also be multiplied together, thus: 3 x 2 = 6 
worlds, three heavens and three earths.t Or again, to form 
a new magic number, we can add the unit to a given mystic 
number: 3 +1, 6 + 1, 9 + 1, etc. ‘‘ The usual object of 
this is to introduce into any system of the universe whatever 
the idea of an invisible world, or into any group whatever, 
of persons or things the idea of a person or thing of the same 
kind, but distinguished from the rest by a sort of mystery 
which surrounds him or it.”’2 The number 7, for instance, 
may possibly have independent mythological value; but it 
is certain that the Rishis have at least divided it into 6 + x, 
the addition of the unit to the number of the six worlds. These 
mythological numbers derive their virtue from their mystic 
relation to the spatial regions: the septenary division of the 
universe, for example, (seven worlds, i.e. 6 + 1) coincides 
with the mythological heptads, the seven places, races, ocean ~ 
depths, rivers, and so forth. 

That prelogical mentality is at work in these already 
systematized collective representations can be proved by the 
way in which the one and the many are identified. It is thus, 
says Bergaigne, that “‘ most groups of mythological beings or 
objects may be reduced to a single being or object with many 
forms, which sums up the group as a whole. The elements 
of each group are in this way revived as so many manifesta- 
tions of a single principle; and the multiplicity of these 
manifestations is accounted for by the multiplicity of the 
worlds. . . . The seven prayers are only the seven forms of 
the prayer which, considered both in its unity and in its 
different manifestations, becomes the prayer or hymn with 
seven heads. . . . The seven cows of the master of the prayer 
are naturally the seven prayers issuing from his seven mouths. 
. . . A male has two or three mothers, two or three wives, 
Ber 8 

This leads to a conclusion which at first appears extra- 
ordinary ; different numbers are nevertheless equal numbers. 


1 Bergaigne, La Religion Védique, ii. p. 115. 
4 Thid., ti. pp: 123 et seq 3 Ibid., ii. pp. 147-8. 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 221 


‘“ The simultaneous and impartial use of three and seven . . . 
proves but one thing: their complete equivalence... . 
The various numbers we have found used for one another, 
because they all express, in different systems of division, the 
sum of the parts of the universe, have for the same reason 
been capable of being used, by a kind of pleonasm, side by 
side with each other. In fact, this has frequently been done. 
In this way, three is the same as seven, or as nine.” This 
equivalence, an absurdity to logical thought, seems quite 
natural to prelogical mentality, for the latter, preoccupied 
with the mystic participation, does not regard these numbers 
in an abstract relation to other numbers, or with respect to 
the arithmetical law in which they originate. The primitive 
mind considers each as a reality grasped by itself, and not 
needing for its definition to be regarded as a functioning of 
other numbers. Thus every number has an inviolate indi- 
viduality which allows it to correspond exactly with another 
number, itself equally inviolate. ‘‘ Most of the mythological 
numbers of the Rig-Veda, especially 2, 3, 5 and 7, express, 
not merely an indefinite plurality, but a totality, and this 
totality answers in principle to the ensemble of the worlds.” 1 
Let it be, for instance, the mythical bull, having “‘ four horns, 
three feet, two heads, seven hands: bound with a threefold 
cord, the bull bellows, etc.” (Here we have two, three, seven, 
worlds, and four cardinal points.) The different characteristics 
in the description all indicate, by their allusion to the different 
divisional systems of the universe, that the personage in 
question is present everywhere.? We know from other sources 
that the idea of omnipresence, or of ‘‘ multipresence,”’ accord- 
ing to Leibnitz’ expression, is absolutely familiar to prelogical, 
mystical mentality. 

Finally, to complete the delineation of these mystic 
numbers, Bergaigne says further: .“‘ The numbers three and 
seven, in the general system of Vedic mythology, should be 
regarded as frameworks prepared beforehand, independently 
of the personalities which may be summoned to occupy 
them.’"’3 Frameworks prepared beforehand: that is to say, 
categories, according to the expression used by Chamberlain, 


* Bergaigne, La Religion Védique, ii. P. 156. 
TID Pu pie kar, 3 Ibid., iii. p. gg. 


222 HOW NATIVES THINK 


quoted above, and dealing with this precise subject. There is 
no better way of emphasizing the difference between these 
mystic numbers and those which serve the purpose of arith- 
metical calculation. Instead of the number depending on 
the actual plurality of the objects perceived or pictured, it 
is on the contrary the objects whose plurality is defined 
by receiving its form from a mystic number decided upon 
beforehand. Thus the properties of numbers predetermine, 
as it were, what the multiplicity will be in the collective 
representations. 

How does it happen, we may ask, that the mystic nature 
of numbers is not most clearly manifest where the representa- 
tions are themselves most profoundly mystic, that is, in the 
peoples of the most primitive type familiar to us? How is 
it that this mystic character seems, on the contrary, more 
strongly marked in cases where logical thinking is already 
somewhat developed, and knows how to use numbers in a 
really arithmetical method—in the races of North America : 
and the Far East, for instance, whilst it is not noticed in 
the Australian aboriginals, or in the South American or Indian 
primitives? It may seem as if our theory does not take all 
the facts of the case into account, and that if we are to explain 
the mystic virtues attributed to numbers, we must have 
recourse to other principles than the participations of which 
these numbers are the vehicles in the collective representations. 

This objection may be answered in the following ways : 

(1) Among peoples still wholly primitive, numbers (above 
two or three) are as yet undifferentiated, and consequently 
they do not figure as actual numbers in the collective repre- 
sentations. As they have not been the object of an abstraction, 
not even of that isolating but not generalizing abstraction 
peculiar to prelogical mentality, they are never imagined 
per se. And above all, having no names, they can never act 
as condensers of mystic virtues, a part attributed to them in 
the collective representations of more advanced peoples. 

(2) Above all, however, it is possibly in this undifferentiated 
and unnamed state that the mystic efficacy of the number is 
greatest. The divisions of the social group into totems, 
clans, phratries, which are themselves subdivided, although 
not expressed numerically, nevertheless comprehend definite 


PRIMITIVES’ NUMERATION 223 


numbers ; and have we not found that these divisions and 
their numbers extend to all reality represented, to animals, 
plants, inanimate objects, stars, spatial directions? Institu- 
tions, beliefs, religious and magical practices—-do not all 
these constantly imply, through these same divisions and 
“ Classifications,” the numbers which are comprised therein 
without being expressed? Yet it is precisely because the 
mentality which is mystic and prelogical moves thus in an 
element natural to it, that we find it so difficult to reconstruct 
it. Whatever the effort we may make, a number which is 
purely intricate, undifferentiated, felt and not concelved, is 
unimaginable to us. A number is not a number to us unless 
we imagine it and as soon as we picture it we imagine it 
logically and with a name. There is no doubt that, once 
named, we can very well conceive of it, either from the abstract 
point of view, without any qualifying attribute, and absolutely 
homogeneous with other numbers, or as a sacred vehicle of 
mystic qualities. Our religions, and sometimes our meta- 
physics, still tell us of such numbers, and our myths, legends, 
and folklore have familiarized us with them. But it is far 
more difficult to go back to a number which has no name, and 
to discover the function it fulfils in the collective representa- 
tions of primitive peoples. 


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PART “Tit 


15 





CHAPTER VI 


INSTITUTIONS IN WHICH COLLECTIVE REPRE- 
SENTATIONS GOVERNED BY THE LAW OF 
PARTICIPATION ARE INVOLVED (I) 


INTRODUCTION 


Our study of the collective representations and their inter- 
relations among primitives has led us to conclude that these 
people possess a mystic, prelogical mentality differing in 
many essentials from our logical thinking. This conclusion, 
moreover, seems to have been confirmed by our examination 
of certain characteristics in the languages spoken by primi- 
tives and the system of numeration used. A counter-proof, 
however, is necessary. We therefore have to show that primi- 
tives’ ways of acting do indeed correspond with their ways of 
thinking, as analysed in this volume, and that their collective 
representations express themselves in their institutions with 
the mystic, prelogical characteristics already noted. Such 
a demonstration would not only yield a valuable verification 
of my theory, but would lead the way to a better interpre- 
tation of these institutions than any of the psychological 
and merely probable “explanations’”’ so often urged, can 
afford, for this interpretation must above all take into 
account the mentality that is pos to the social groups 
under consideration. 

By way of example I have selected a certain number of 
institutions, preferring either the simplest or else those which, 
as far as our knowledge goes at present, seem best suited to 
show the nature of prelogical mentality most clearly. In 
no case, however, have I ventured to suggest an “‘ explana- 
tion,” nor to reduce these examples to a general principle 
which would account equally well for all. To ‘“ explain” 


228 HOW NATIVES THINK 


these customs or institutions properly would require a detailed 
monograph in each case, and I need hardly say that not even 
the first faint outline will be found here. My object is some- 
thing quite different, and its scope is much more general. 
I only desire to show that if we are to understand these insti- 
tutions and these practices we must refer them to that 
prelogical, mystic mentality, the chief laws of which I have 
endeavoured to determine, the mentality which is peculiar to 
primitives. Admitting these laws to have been established, 
the savant has still to inquire into the conditions in which 
each of these special institutions and practices has made its 
appearance and maintained its existence in any given com- 
munity, but at any rate he will henceforth have at his disposal, 
to minimize the risk of his going astray, a clue which only too 
often was lacking to his predecessors 


I 


Let us first of all consider the operations by means of 
which the social group procures its sustenance—hunting and 
fishing, more particularly. Here, success is dependent upon 
a number of objective conditions: the presence of the game 
or the fish in a certain place, the necessary precautions in 
approaching it unperceived, the traps set to entice it to the 
desired spot, the projectiles required to bring it down and 
so forth. To the mind of the primitive, however, these con- 
ditions, although necessary, are by no means sufficient, and 
unless others be fulfilled, all the means employed will fail, 
whatever the skill of the hunter or fisherman. These means 
must possess magic virtue, must be endowed, so to speak, 
through the performance of special rites, with mystic power, 
just as the objective elements which are perceived are sur- 
rounded by a mystic complex. Without such magic perform- 
ance, the most experienced hunter or fisherman will fail to 
find game or fish, or if he does perceive it, it will escape 
the snare or the hook. Or again, his bow or his gun will 
miscarry. He may even attack his prey, and prove it invul- 
nerable ; or, having wounded it he may fail to findit. Thus 
the mystic operations are not mere preliminaries of the chase 
or the fishing, like St. Hubert’s Mass; for example, when the 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 229 


effectual pursuit of game or fish remains the essential feature 
of the occasion. On the contrary, this effectual pursuit is 
not the most important factor to the primitive mind; the 
really essential part is the mystic process which alone can 
bring about the he presence, and secure the capture, of the prey. 
If such a process does not take place, there is no object in 
making any effort in the matter. 

Processes of such a kind are manifold and often complex. 
For the sake of clearness I shall distinguish between those 
which must be carried out before, during, and after the chase ; 
and also those exercised upon the agent, (or the members of 
his group) to ensure his striking a successful blow, and those 
which have his prey as their aim, either to render it unable 
to escape or to defend itself, or else to pacify it and obtain 
pardon for its death. Accordingly we shall see action domin- 
ated by an ensemble of definite mystic relations, dependent 
upon the collective representations of the social group and, 
like these collective representations themselves, governed by 
the law of participation. 

A. In hunting, the very first essential is to exert a magic 
influence upon the game pursued, to secure its presence, 
willingly or unwillingly, and to constrain it to come from a 
distance if need be. With most primitive people this process 
is considered indispensable. It consists mainly of dances, 
incantations and fasts. Catlin has given a detailed descrip- 
tion of the buffalo dance, ‘‘ held for the purpose of making 
‘buffalo come’, as they term it... . About ten or fifteen 
Mandans at a time join in the dance, each one with the skin 
of the buffalo’s head (or mask) with the horns on, and in his 
hand his favourite bow or lance, with which he is used to slay 
the buffalo... . These dances have sometimes been con- 
tinued for two or three weeks without stopping an instant, 
until the joyful moment when buffaloes make their appear- 
ance.’’ (They represent the capture and the killing of the 
buffalo.) ‘‘ When an Indian becomes fatigued of the exercise, 
he signifies it by bending quite forward, and sinking his body 
towards the ground; when another draws a bow upon him 
and hits him with a blunt arrow, and he falls like a buffalo, 
is seized by the bystanders, who drag him out of the ring by 
the heels, brandishing their knives about him; and having 


 dérotssiiiet 


230 HOW NATIVES THINK 


gone through the motions of skinning and cutting him up, 
they let him off, and his place is at once supplied by another, 
who dances into the ring with his mask on; and by this 
taking of places, the scene is easily kept up night and day, 
until the desired effect, that of making ‘ buffalo come,’ has 
been produced.”’ ! 

It is a kind of drama, or rather pantomime, representing 
the prey and the fate that awaits him at the hands of the 
Indians. Since the primitive mind does not recognize an 
image, pure and simple ;—since to him the image participates 
of the original, and the original of the image, to be conversant 
with the image already, to some extent, ensures the possession 
of the original. This mystic participation constitutes the 
virtue of the operation. 

In other places, this participation assumes a slightly 
different form. To secure the presence of the animal, it is 
essential to conciliate it. With the Sioux, for instance, ‘the 
bear-dance . . . is given several days in succession, previous 
to their starting out, and . . . they all join in a song to the 
Bear Spirit which, they think, holds somewhere an invisible 
existence, and must be consulted and conciliated before they 
can enter upon their excursion with any prospect of success. 

. . One of the chief medicine-men placed over his body 
the entire skin of a bear. . . . Many others in the dance 
wore masks on their faces, made of the skin from the bear’s 
head ; and all, with the motions of their hands, closely imitated 
the movements of that animal, some representing its motion 
in running, and others the peculiar attitude, and hanging of 
the paws, when it is sitting up on its hind feet, and looking 
for the approach of an enemy.” ? Occasionally, the operations 
have undergone a kind of simplification of an abstract kind, 
which nevertheless allows their real nature to be perceived. 
‘In order to cause the deer to move towards the locality 
where they may be desired, the shaman will erect, on a pole 
placed in a favourable position, an image of some famous — 
hunter and conjurer. The image will represent the power 
of the person as conjurer, and the various paraphernalia 
attached to the image assist in controlling the movements 


1 Catlin, The North American Indians, i. pp. 127-8. 
2 Ibid., 1. pp. 245-6. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 231 


of the animals.’ :—In West Africa, Nassau tells us, the native 
appeals to his fetich in hunting, warfare, trading, love-making, 
fishing, tree-planting, and starting upon a journey. ‘The 
hunter or hunters start out, each with his own fetich hanging 
from his belt or suspended from his shoulder . . . or if the 
hunt includes several persons, a temporary charm may be 
performed by the witch-doctor, or even by the hunters 
themselves. Such ceremonies preliminary to the chase are 
described by W. H. Brown as performed in Mashonaland,” ? 
and their object appears to be that of obliging the animals 
to appear. Conversely, certain acts are forbidden, because 
they would produce the contrary effect. ‘To name even the 
word deer when searching for one is ‘mali’ or ‘ tabooed,’ 
and now they thought it was useless my going to look for them 
any more. . . . They listen to omens religiously whenever on 
a hunting or fishing expedition, and never name the animal 
for fear that the spirits should carry information to the object 
of pursuit.” 3 In British Columbia, “ should a pubescent girl 
eat fresh meat, it was believed her father’s luck as a hunter 
would be spoiled thereafter. The animals would not permit 
him to kill them; for it was held that no animal could be 
killed against its own wish and will. Indeed the Indian 
looked upon all his food, animal and vegetable, as gifts volun- 
tarily bestowed upon him by the ‘spirit’ of the animal or 
vegetable, and regarded himself as absolutely dependent upon 
their good will for his daily sustenance.’’ 4 

B. The magic operations to which the hunter himself 
must submit aim at securing for him mystic power over the 
game. These are often lengthy and complicated. In Canada, 
“the hunters observe a week’s fast, during which time they 
may not drink a drop of water . . . they do not cease their 
incantations while the daylight lasts . . . many of them cut 
themselves in various parts of the body . . . and all this is 
done to induce the spirits to reveal where bears are to be 
found in large numbers. . . . With the same end in view, 
they offer prayers to the nae of the beasts they have 
slaughtered in previous hunts. . . . Before they set out, all, 


t Turner, “‘ The Hudson Bay Eskimo,” Æ. B. Rept., xi. pp. 196-7. 

2 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 173. 

3 Brooke, Ten Years in Sarawak, ii. pp. 90-1. 

4 Hill Tout, “The Ethnology of the StatlumH,”’ J.Ad., xxxv. p. 136. 


232 HOW NATIVES THINK 


or at any rate, most of them, must have seen bears in the 
same district in their dreams. . . . Later on, they bathe, 
whatever the weather may be, and a feast is given by the 
head hunter, who eats nothing himself, but recounts his 
hunting exploits. There are renewed invocations to the spirits 
of the dead bears, and then they begin their march, besmeared 
with black, equipped as for war, and acclaimed by the whole 
village.” t So too, Nicolas Perrot relates: ‘‘ This festival is 
always preceded by a week’s fast, neither food nor drink being 
allowed, so that the bear may be favourable to him and to. 
his party, and this means that he desires to find and kill 
bears without any disastrous consequences to him or any of 
his people. . . . When the day of departure arrives, he calls 
them all together, and they blacken their faces with charcoal 
as he does ; acy. all fast until evening, and then eat but 
very little.” 

\lt is qu universal among primitive peoples that the 
hunter, about to start upon an expedition, should abstain 
from sexual relations, take careful note of his dreams, cleanse 
his person, fast, or at any rate, eat certain foods only, paint 
and adorn himself in a special manner; and all of these are 
practices which will have mystic effects upon the game he 
desires to capture. Boas tells us that “the mountain-goat 
hunter fasts and bathes for several nights. Then early in the 
morning he paints his chin with red paint, and draws a red 
line over his forehead down to the point of his nose. Two 
tail feathers of the eagle are fastened to his hair. These 
ornaments are believed to enable him to climb well. The elk 
hunter adorns his hair with coal, red paint, and eagle down, 
etc.” 3 The special aim of such adornment is to gain the 
animal’s favour. A bear-hunter assured Boas that he him- 
self had received instructions from a bear regarding what he 
was to wear. 

Mooney describes the magic preparations for the hunt 
made by the Cherokees, and in explaining them he reproduces 
the formulas which reveal their signification. He tells us that 


t Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l Amérique Septentrionale, iii, 
pp. T15~16 (1721). 
2 Mémoire sur les Meurs . de l'Amérique Septentrionale, pp. 66-7. 
3 F. Boas, ‘ The North- west Tribes of Canada,’ Reports of the British 
Association, p. 460 (1894). 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 233 


the night before the departure the hunter “ goes to the water ”’ 
and recites the appropriate formula. In the morning he leaves 
without breaking his fast, and he neither eats nor drinks 
during the day’s march. At sunset he again goes to the water 
and repeats his incantation, and then he encamps, lights his 
fire, eats his supper and, after having rubbed his breast with 
ashes, he lies down for the night. Next morning his quest 
begins . . . and in all hunting expeditions it is the rule, and 
almost a religious injunction, to abstain from food until 
sunset. . . . The hunter addresses his supplications to the 
fire whence he draws his omens, to the reeds of which he 
makes his arrows, to Tsu’lkala the great lord of the game, 
and finally he addresses in songs the very animals he is seeking 
to slay.? 

In British Guiana, ‘‘ before an Indian sets out to hunt, he 
goes through one or more strange performances to ensure 
success. Round his house he has planted various sorts of 
‘beenas’ or plants, generally caladiums, which he supposes 
to act as charms to make the capture of game certain. These 
are for his dogs, which are made to swallow pieces of the roots 
and leaves. Sometimes the poor brutes have to undergo 
more painful operations. . . . The hunter inflicts tortures on 
himself . . . he submits to the bite of ants of a large and 
venomous kind . . . and rubs himself with caterpillars which 
irritate his skin, etc.2 Finally, the weapons and implements 
of the chase must also be endowed with special virtue by 
means of magical operations. To give but one example only, 
—it is customary among the Fang in West Africa to make, 
previous to the expedition, biang nzali, which is a charm for 
the guns, and to place the weapons upon it: this will enable 
them to go direct to their mark.”’ 3 

C. Let us now assume that'all the operations have attained 
their end and the prey is in sight : will it now suffice to attack 
and strike it down? By no means; here again, everything 
depends upon the practice of magic. For instance, with the 
Sioux, “on coming in sight of the herd, the hunters talk 
kindly to their horses, applying to them the endearing 


t J. Mooney, “The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, IY pa 8 Pall oe. 2) 


vii. EP 370, 372, 342 
2 Im Thurm, Among the Indians of Guiana, pp. 228-31, 
3 Bennett, ‘“‘ Ethnographical Notes on the Fang,” /.4.1., xxix. p. 94. 


234 HOW NATIVES THINK 


names of father, brother, uncle, etc. . . . The party having 
approached near to the herd, they halt to give the pipe bearer 
an opportunity to perform the ceremony of smoking, which 
is considered necessary to their success. He lights his pipe 
and remains a short time with his head inclined, and the 
stem of the pipe extended towards the herd. He then smokes 
and puffs the smoke towards the bisons, and the earth, and 
finally to the cardinal points successively.’’! This rite is 
evidently intended to bring the animals into mystic relation 
with the hunters and with certain spatial positions which will 
prevent their escaping.| It is magic enchantment, designed 
to make sure of them. We find something similar in Malaya. 
‘When the hiding-place (of the deer) is discovered, all the 
young men of the kampong assemble, and the following cere- 
mony is performed.” . . . (A description is here given.) “It 
is believed that the absence of this ceremony would render 
the expedition unsuccessful, the deer would prove too strong 
for the ropes. . . .’2 So, too, in South Africa, Livingstone 
relates of one of his men that he was considered the leader 
of the hunting expedition, by virtue of his having a knowledge 
of “‘ elephant medicine.” He would go in front of the rest, 
and examine the animals, everything depending upon his 
verdict. ‘If he decided to attack a herd, the rest went 
boldly on, but if he refused, none of them would engage. 
A certain part of the elephant belonged to him by right. . . .”’ 3 
Lastly, in South Australia, in hunting emus, it is not enough 
to have discovered their whereabouts ; they must be rendered 
powerless by means of magical operations. ‘‘ A mineral stone 
about the size of a pigeon’s egg . . . is found in the quarries 
and called ‘emu eye’ by the natives. These stones are © 
wrapped in feathers and fat, and when within a few hundred 
yards of the birds they commence throwing them towards 
the emus, believing there is a charm about the stones and 
that it prevents the emus from running.” 4 

In New South Wales, ‘“ when a man went out hunting, 
he took with him a charmed wommera or spear-lever, the hook 

t Dorsey, “‘ Siouan Cults,” £. B. Rept., xi. pp. 375-6. 

2 Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 172. 

3 Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 599-600. 


4 Gason, “‘ Manners, Customs, etc., of the Dieri, Auminie Tribes,” J.4.7., 
XXIV. p. 172 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 235 


of which consisted of a bone from a dead man’s arm, ground 
to a point. The fat of the corpse was mixed with the gum 
used in lashing the hook to the shaft of the weapon. When 
the hunter espied an emu, kangaroo, turkey or similar game, 
he held up the wommera in sight of the animal, which would 
thereby be spellbound, and unable to run away. . . . When 
a clever man is out hunting and comes across the tracks of, 
say, a kangaroo, he follows them along and talks to the foot- 
prints all the time for the purpose of injecting magic into the 
animal which made them. He mentions in succession all 
the parts of the foot, and then names the different parts of the 
leg right up to the animal’s back. As soon as he reaches the 
backbone, the creature becomes quite stupid and is an easy 
prey.... Or again, “‘a hunter takes some fat, or skin, or 
piece of bone, of a dead man, and puts it into a little bag. 
He then goes to some place in the bush frequented by kanga- 
roos, emus, etc. . . . Here he selects a tree belonging to the 
proper phratry, and hangs his little bag on one of the spreading 
branches. When an animal gets within ‘shooting distance ’ 
of this magical artillery, it becomes stupid, and wanders about 
heedlessly until the hunter gets an opportunity of spearing 
it.” Or yet again, ‘as soon as some emus or kangaroos 
appeared in sight, the men commenced chewing human hair 
and spitting towards the animals, accompanied by magical 
incantations. This was expected to work a charm on the 
game and cause them to remain quiet and sluggish, so that 
a man could steal upon them. . . . In following along the 
tracks of an emu, kangaroo, wild dog, etc., if the hunter at 
intervals drop hot coals in the footmarks of the animal, this 
will have the effect of making it hot and tired, or induce it 
to come round again towards its pursuer.’’! Similarly, near 
Port Lincoln, ‘‘ the superstitious simplicity of these natives 
is strikingly apparent in their manner of hunting. . . . There 
have been transmitted to them, by their early ancestors, 
several short rhymes of two lines, which now are known to 
the adults only, and these, on pursuing an animal, or when 
on the point of spearing it, they constantly repeat with great 


1 Mathews, “‘ Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria,” 
Jownal and Proceedings of the Royal Soctety of New South Wales, vol. xxxviii. 
PP- 254-7 (1905). 


236 HOW NATIVES THINK 


rapidity. The literal meaning is totally unknown to them, 
and they are quite unable to give an explanation of them, . . 
but they faithfully believe them to possess the power, either 
to strike with blindness the animal which they are pursuing, 
or to create in it such a feeling of security and carelessness, 
that it cannot perceive its enemies or to weaken it so that it 
cannot effect its escape.’’ ! 

These are very significant facts. They show clearly that 
hunting is an essentially magical operation, and in it every- 
thing depends, not on the skill or strength of the hunter, but 
on the mystic power which will place the animal at his mercy. 

With many peoples success depends, too, upon certain 
inhibitions to be observed during the hunters’ absence by 
those who did not accompany them, and particularly by their 
wives. In Indo-China, for instance, “the Laotian hunters 

. set out after having recommended their women to 
practise strict abstinence during their absence ; they forbade 
them to cut their hair, anoint themselves with oil, to place 
the pestle and mortar for the rice out of doors behind the 
house, or to make light of the marriage contract, for such 
practices would prejudice the result of the hunt... . If the 
captured elephant in its struggles succeeds in overthrowing 
the mounts engaged in subduing it, it is because the wife left 
at home is unfaithful to her husband. If the rope that binds 
it breaks, she must have cut her hair; and if the rope slips 
so that the beast escapes, she must have smeared herself 
with oil.” 2 

“When setting out they make offerings of rice, spirit, 
ducks, fowls, to the spirits of the long ropes with a running 
noose which are to be used in capturing the elephants. Yet 
more, the hunters command their wives to abstain from 
cutting their hair or offering the hospitality of their homes to 
astranger. Should these commands be disobeyed, the animals 
captured would escape, and the incensed husband would have 
the right to a divorce on his return. On his side, the hunter 
must abstain from sexual relations and, in accordance with 
a custom very common in Further India, must give conven- 


t Wilhelmi, ‘‘ Manners and Customs of the Australian Natives, in Par- 
ticular of the Port Lincoln District,’ Royal Society of Australia, v. p. 176 
1860). 
2 Aymonier, Voyage dans le Laos, i. pp. 62-3. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 237 


tional names to all ordinary things, which has the effect of 
creating a special ‘hunter’s language.’ In the hunting-field 
the chief chants certain formulas, handed down from father 
to son.”’1 So, too, with the Huichols during the hunting of 
the deer, a matter of the greatest significance to them, “the. 
important thing is that the chiefs, and the woman who has 
officiated, do not infringe the law of fasting. They follow 
the hunters in their thoughts all the time, and pray to the fire 
and the sun and all the other gods to give success, and thus, 
happiness to all. ... Now and then some of the fasters 
would rise and pray aloud, and with so much fervour that 
they and all the rest were moved to tears.”? From Schoolcraft 
we learn that if an Indian is unlucky in the chase he at once 
declares that someone must have broken their laws.3 

D. Even when the game has been shot down and retrieved, 
all is not over. Fresh magical operations are necessary to 
conclude the cycle that the initial ones have begun; just in 
the same way as in the sacrifice, the opening rites, as Hubert 
and Mauss have demonstrated, correspond with the concluding 
rites. These operations are of two kinds, and it is sometimes 
difficult to distinguish between them. The object of the 
earlier ones is to stultify the animal’s vengeance—and at the 
same time that of the spirit which represents all the animals 
of the species ; for prelogical mentality, governed by the law 
of participation, does not recognize any distinct difference 
between the individual and the substance of the species. 
The later ones tend to pacify the victim (or its spirit). Death 
does not bring about entire disappearance in the case of 
animals any more than it does with men. On the contrary 
they continue to live, that is, to participate in the existence 
of their group, although in slightly different conditions, and, 
again like men, they are destined to be born again. Accord- 
ingly it is of the greatest importance to remain on friendly 
terms with them. 

Mooney tells us that the Cherokees have formulas for 
appeasing the animals which have been slaughtered, and that 
the hunter, when returning to camp, lights a fire on the road 


t Aymonier, Voyage dans le Laos, i. p. 311. 
2 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, ii. p. 43. 
3 Schoolcraft, Information, etc., ii. p. 175. 


238 HOW NATIVES THINK 


behind him so that the deer chief cannot follow him to his 
home,? (and inflict him with illness, particularly a rheumatic 
affection). In Canada, “ when a bear has been killed, the 
hunter puts the bowl of his pipe between the animal’s teeth, 
blows down it, and thus filling its mouth and throat with 
smoke, entreats its spirit not to harbour resentment for what 
its body has suffered, and not to injure his prospects in any 
succeeding chase he may undertake.” ?—Among the Indians 
of Nootka Sound, “‘ after well cleansing the bear from the dirt 
and blood with which it is generally covered when killed, it 
is brought in and seated opposite the king, with a chief’s 
bonnet wrought in figures on its head, and its fur powdered 
over with white down. A tray of provision is then set before 
it, and it is invited by words and gestures to eat.” 3 Nothing 
is more common than the rendering of such honours to animals 
slain in the chase. Sometimes the ceremony assumes a 
mysterious character, and must be carried out away from the 


presence of the unbeliever. In West Africa, for instance 


“even my presence,” writes Nassau, “ was objected to by 
the mother of the hunter ; (he, however, was willing). After 
the animal had been decapitated, and its quarters and bowels 
removed, the hunter, naked, stepped into the hollow of the 
ribs, and kneeling in the bloody pool contained in that hollow, 
bathed his entire body with that mixture of blood and excreta, 
at the same time praying the life-spirit of the hippo that it 
would bear him no ill-will for having killed it, and thus cut 
it off from future maturity ; and not to incense other hippo- 
potami that they should attack his canoe in revenge.’ 4 It 
was evidently rites of this kind to which Du Chaillu was 
referring when he wrote: ‘‘ Before the manga (a kind of 
mamatee) was cut up, the manga doctor went through some 
ceremonies which I did not see, and nobody was permitted to 
see the animal while he was cutting it up.’’5 In the case of 
the Huichols, it is a public ceremony, and a very complicated 
one. “The animal was laid so that its legs were turned 
toward the east, and all sorts of food and bowls of tesvino 


1 J. Mooney, “‘ The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., vii. 
P. 347- 
2 Charlevoix, op. cit., iii, p. 118. 
3 Jewitt, Adventures and Sufferings, P. 133. 
4 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 204. 
5 Equatorial Africa, pp. 402-3. 





PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 239 


| were placed in front of it. Everyone in turn stepped up to 
the deer, stroking him with the right hand from the snout 
to the tail, and thanking him because he had allowed himself 
to be caught. ‘ Rest thyself, elder brother’ (if it be a doe 
they call her elder sister), A shaman may talk to the dead 
animal for a long time. . . . ‘ Thou hast brought us plumes, 
and we are profoundly thankful.’’”’: We know that antlers 
are akin to plumes. By means of such ceremonies normal 
relations between the social group to which the hunter belongs 
and the group of the slaughtered animal, are re-established 
once more. The murder is cancelled, and there is no longer 
_ any reason to dread vengeance. Fresh hunting expeditions 
_ again become possible in the future, provided that they are 
accompanied by the same mystic practices. 


II 


The primitive peoples whose main sustenance is derived 
from fishing proceed in just the same way as those who depend 
upon hunting for their food supply. They exercise magic 
influence upon the fish by means of dances similar to those 
I have just cited. ‘‘ The dances of the Torres Straits islanders 
are practised at night, and have for their object success in 
hunting and fishing. It is on these occasions that the extra- 
ordinary masks of tortoise-shell are used, and I assume that 
the forms of the masks to be worn would have relation to the 
particular sport to be engaged in ; for example, in the dance to 
ensure success in fishing, the mask would represent a fish, 
and so on.”’2—In the Nicobar Isles, ‘‘ during the whole of 
the day, the people were engaged in preparing torches for the 
ceremony of Ki-alah for ‘ multiplying the fish in the sea,’ 
and then started their fishing at night.” 3 

The fisherman, like the hunter, must previously undergo 
_ fasts, rites of purification, periods of abstinence, in short, he 
must submit to mystic preparation. ‘‘ When a man was going 
to hunt sea-otter he fasted and kept away from his wife for 
a month. He kept his chamber box behind the door, always 

1 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, ii. p. 45. 

2 C. H. Read, “‘ Stone Spinning Tops from Torres Straits,” Fa TS Xvi 


ak yf 
3 Solomon, “ Diaries kept in Car Nicobar,’”’ /.A.J., xxxii. p. 2 8 


240 HOW NATIVES THINK 


urinated into it, and let no one else touch it. At the end of 
the month he started out after an eagle, and having killed 
one cut off the foot and tied a certain flower to it. Then he 
made a miniature canoe with figures of himself and perhaps 
others inside, and he represented himself in the act of aiming 
at a sea-otter. He made the eagle’s talon clasp the seat so 
that he could have a sure aim and secure the animal. When 
at length he went out and was beginning to approach the sea- 
otter he blew some of his urine towards it. This would confuse 
it, so that it would swim in his direction. Sometimes he tied 
a piece of wood to the eagle’s talon so that the sea-otter would 
stand right up in the water like a buoy, and be easily shot.’’! 

‘“Those who go to catch sturgeon bathe in a pond early 
in the morning.” 2 Jewitt says of the Indians of Nootka 
Sound, ‘‘ the king makes a point of passing a day alone on the 
mountain, whither he goes very privately early in the morning, 
and does not return till late in the evening. This is done for 
the purpose of singing and praying to his god for success in . 


whaling the ensuing season. . . . The next two days he appears 
very thoughtful and gloomy, scarcely speaking to anyone, 
and observes a most rigid fast. . . . In addition to this, for 


a week before commencing their whaling, both himself and 
the crew of his canoe observe a fast, eating but very little, 
and going into the water several times in the course of each 
day to bathe, singing and rubbing their bodies, limbs and 


faces, with shells and bushes . . . they are likewise obliged 
to abstain from any commerce with their women for the like 
period.” 3 


Sometimes these mystic observances are concentrated upon 
a single individual who thus becomes, as it were, the vehicle 
of the magic relation established between the human social 
group and the fish group. A very fine example of partici- 
pation of this sort is to be found among the New Guinea 
natives. ‘‘ The preparation for dugong and turtle fishing are 
most elaborate, and commence two months before the fishing 
is started. A headman is appointed who becomes belaga 
(holy). On his strict observance of the laws of the dugong 


t Swanton, ‘* The Tlingit Indians,”’ E. B. Rept., XXvi. P. 447 
2 F, Boas, “ The North-west Tribes of Canada,” Reports of the British 
AU p. 460 (1894). 
3 Jewitt, Adventures and Sufferings, pp. 154-5. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 241 


net depends the success of the season. He lives entirely 
secluded from his family, and is only allowed to eat a roasted 
banana or two after the sun has gone down. Each evening 
at sundown he goes ashore and bathes on the point of land 
overlooking the dugong feeding-ground . . . meanwhile throw- 
ing into the sea some mula-mula, i.e. medicine to charm the 
dugong. While he is undergoing these privations all the able- 
bodied men of the village are employed in collecting bark . . . 
and making nets.” 

Among the Ten’a Indians of the Yukon territory, when 
the fishing season is beginning, a medicine-man is reputed to 
penetrate beneath the ice to the place where the salmon, in 
large numbers, spend the winter. This is evidently with the 
purpose of securing their goodwill.z So too with the Hurons, 
‘in each fishing hut there is generally a ‘fish preacher,’ 
accustomed to exhort the fishes by a sermon: if these are * 
clever men, they are greatly sought after, because the Hurons 
believe that the exhortations of an able man have much power 
to entice fish into their nets. The one we had was held to 
be one of the best; and it was a fine sight to witness his 
efforts, both by word of mouth and by gesture when he 
preached, as he used to do every evening after supper, after 
having first enjoined silence, and arranged everyone in his 
place, lying at full length around him. . . . His argument 
was that the Hurons never burned fish-bones, and then he 
proceeded, in the most affectionate terms, exhorting the fish, 
entreating and conjuring them to appear, to allow themselves 
to be caught, to take courage and not be afraid, since they 
were serving their friends, who honoured them, and never 
burned their bones. . . . To secure a good haul, they also 
burn snuff sometimes, using certain expressions which I do 
not understand. They throw some, too, with a like intention, 
into the water for particular spirits whom they believe to be 
_ presiding there, or rather, for the soul of the water, (since they 
believe all material and inanimate things to possess a soul 
that can hear) and they entreat it, in their customary fashion, 
to be of good courage, and allow them to take a goodly number 
of fish.’’ 3 


* Guise, ‘“‘ Wangela River Natives,” J-A.T., xxviii. p. 218. 

+ Fr, Jetté, ‘ On the Medicine-men of the Ten’a,’”’ /.A.1., xxxvii. D.°174. 

3 Fr. Sagard, Le Grand Voyage au pays des Hurons,” PP. 257-9 (1632). 
16 


242 HOW NATIVES THINK 


The fisherman’s canoe and all his implements must, like 
his own personality, be invested with magic virtue to ensure 
success. In Malay, ‘“‘each boat that puts to sea has been 
medicined with care; many incantations and other magic 
observances having been had recourse to. . . . After each take 
the boat is ‘swept’ by the medicine man with a tuft of leaves 
prepared with mystic ceremonies which is carried at the bow 
for the purpose’: Just as the hunter prays to his horse 
and his weapons, so too, does the fisherman entreat the good- 
will of his nets. ‘‘One day, when I was about to burn at 
the camp fire the skin of a squirrel which a native had given 
me, the Hurons would not suffer me to do so, but made me 
burn it outside, because there were some nets in the camp at 
that time, saying that if I burned it there, these would tell 
the fish. I told them that the nets could not see, but they 
assured me they could, and that they also saw and ate: 1 
I was once scolding the children of the district for some very 
bad behaviour, and the next day it happened that the men 
caught very few fish; they attributed the fact to this repri- 
mand, which the nets had reported to the fishes.”’ ? 

Many investigators have thought, too, that the form given 
to the fishing apparatus was designed to the same end as the 
ceremonies already described. ‘“‘ It is extremely probable that 
the carvings formerly inserted at the stern of most Torres 
Straits canoes had a magical significance . . . such were... . 
the head of the frigate-bird, and occasionally that of the sea- 
eagle . . . the tail of a king-fish. . . . All these creatures are 
voracious fishers. The indication of a head at the butt-end 
of the dugong harpoons . . . was doubtless magical in signi- 
ficance.’’3 In British Columbia, ‘‘ almost all the clubs that 
I have seen,” says Boas, “‘ represent the sea-lion or the killer- 
whale—the two sea-animals which are most feared by the 
Indians, and which kill those animals that are to be killed by 
means of the club. The idea is . . . to give it a form appro- 
priate to its function, and perhaps, secondarily, to give it, by 
means of its form, great efficiency.” 4 

With the Cherokees, ‘the fisherman must first chew a 


1 Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 193. 

2 Fr. Sagard, op. cit., p. 256. - 

3 The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Stratis, v. p. 338. 
4 F. Boas, op. cit., p. 679. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 243 


small piece of the Venus’ flytrap and spit it upon the bait 
and also upon the hook. Then, standing facing the stream, 
he recites the formula and puts the bait upon the hook... . 
This . . . will enable the hook to attract and hold the fish 
as the plant itself seizes and holds insects in its cup. . . . 
The prayer is addressed directly to the fish, who are repre- 
sented as living in settlements.”’ ! 

During the fishing magical observances must be practised, 
and these correspond closely with those performed by the 
Sioux when the game comes in sight. For instance, in the 
case of the Baganda, ‘ when the net is let down the chief 
fisherman takes some of the herbs they have obtained from 
the priest of Mukasa, which are kept in a special pot, and 
smokes them in a clay pipe; the smoke he pufis from his pipe 
over the water, and it causes the fish to get into the net. . . . 
This pot has a special place where it resides; it is supposed 
to be animate, and resents being put anywhere but in its 
place of honour, and vents its anger by causing the fish to 
escape. . . . The canoes, too, which are used in fishing, have 
fish offered to them.” 2—In New Zealand, we are told, ‘the 
religious ceremonies connected with fishing were very singular. 
The day before they went to sea, the natives arranged all 
their hooks around some human excrement, and used a karakia 
(magic incantation) which will not bear repetition. In the 
same evening there were incantations. . . . When they reached 
the sea, and all the hooks were duly arranged, the tohunga 
set apart for fishing commenced to pray... standing up 
and stretching out his arms. . . . The first fish caught was 
returned to the sea, a karvakia being previously uttered over 
it, to cause it to bring abundance of fish to their hooks.” 3 

Finally, after fishing as after hunting, mystic observances 
are necessary for the purpose of appeasing the “ spirit ”” of 
the creature (and of its tribe) of stultifying its resentment 
and regaining its goodwill. ‘‘ As soon as a sturgeon is caught,” 
says Boas, “the ‘sturgeon hunter’ sings, and by means of 
his song pacifies the struggling sturgeon, who allows himself 
to be killed.” 4 From his study of the Salish and other tribes, 


1 J. Mooney, ‘The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee,” E. B.Rept., vii. p. 83. 
+ Roscoe, “ Manners and Customs of the Baganda,”’ J .AL,, xxxii, pp. 55-6. 
3 R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, pp. 83-6. ' 
4 F. Boas, op. cit., p. 460 (1894). 


244 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Hill Tout has been led to the conclusion that these rites are 
always propitiatory. “They were intended to placate the 
spirits of the fish, or the plant, or the fruit, as the case may 
be, in order that a plentiful supply of the same might be 
vouchsafed to them. The ceremony was not so much a 
thanksgiving as a performance to ensure a plentiful supply 
of the particular object desired ; for if these ceremonies were 
not properly and reverently carried out, there was danger of 
giving offence to the ‘spirits’ of the objects, and of being 
deprived of them.” ! 


III 


Is it necessary to demonstrate that most of the customs 
relating to war betray the same characteristics as those we 
have already studied ? To the primitive mind there is no 
essential difference between fighting and hunting. In this 
pursuit also, we find the opening and the closing rites, the 
mystic ceremonies which mark the beginning of the campaign, 
dances, fasts, abstinence, purification, the consultation of 
dreams, the inhibitions imposed upon non-combatants, incan- 
tations directed against the enemy, charms, amulets, fetishes, 
medicines of all kinds to secure immunity from wounds, 
prayers to entreat the favour of the spirits; then, when the 
action commences, supplications addressed to the horses and 
weapons, the guardian spirits of the individual and the group, 
magical operations and formulas to bring about the blindness 
of the enemy, to incapacitate him from defending himself 
and paralyse his efforts; and lastly, after the battle, the 
ceremonies, often very complicated, by which the conqueror 
endeavours either to ward off the vengeance of his slaughtered 
foes (by mutilating or destroying their corpses) or else to 
conciliate their spirits,? to cleanse himself from the contamina- 
tion he may have suffered during the struggle, and finally to 

1 “ Ethnological Reports of the Halkomelem,” J.A.J., xxxiv. p. 331. 

2 They adopt the same attitude with regard to living prisoners. The 
North American Indians would either torture and kill their prisoners of war, 
or else they would adopt them. In the latter case they gave them the name 
of some dead warrior, whom they would represent henceforth. Thus they 
became merged in the very being of the social group, and from that time 


forward were subject to the same duties and enjoyed the same privileges 
as its other members. Cf. Catlin, The North American Indians, ii. p. 272. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 245 


make his superiority a lasting reality by the possession of 
trophies, such as heads, skulls, jawbones, scalps, weapons, etc. 
From the instant that war is seriously contemplated until the 
moment when it becomes a thing of the past there are always 
mystic relations to establish or to rupture, as the case may 
be, and upon these relations and the necessary operations 
involved the success of the campaign depends above all. 
Gallantry, finesse, superior weapons, numbers, tactics are 
certainly not matters of indifference, but they remain second- 
ary conditions only. If the birds of augury refused to eat 
and the Roman soldiers knew it, they believed that their 
army would be beaten, but among primitive peoples, if the 
dreams are unfavourable they do not even think of fighting. 

Again, our method of presenting these facts, a method 
necessarily in accordance with our mental habit of thought 
and subject to the laws of a language which reflects this habit, 
distorts them in the attempt to explain them. We cannot 
avoid putting the mystic operations on the one side, and the 
actions which combine to bring about the desired results on 
the other. But it is inherent in the very nature of prelogical 
mentality (and this makes it so difficult for us to reconstruct 
it), that there is no difference between these. The operations 
of both kinds form one inseparable method of acting. On 
the one hand, all actions, even those of a most positive char- 
acter, are mystic in their essence. The bow, gun, fishing-net, 
the horse of the hunter or warrior, all these participate in 
mysterious forces brought into action by these ceremonies. 
And on the other hand, these ceremonies are not only the 
indispensable preliminaries of the chase or of the fight : they 
are, themselves, both hunting and fighting. In short, in these 
forms of activity as in perception, primitive mentality has 
another orientation than ours; its character is essentially 
mystic, and its collective representations are governed and 
regulated by the law of participation. 


IV 


We understand, or at any rate we believe we understand, 
without any difficulty the customs of the primitive relating 
to hunting, fishing, and fighting, because we recognize that 


246 HOW NATIVES THINK 


there are, among our own peoples, customs which are 
apparently somewhat similar. Such are the agrarian rites 
still so persistently practised. Such, again, are those of 
a religious rather than mystical character, which intercede 
with a benevolent and powerful intermediary, for the success 
of an undertaking. The Icelandic fishing fleet, for instance, 
does not leave Paimpol without having received a priestly 
blessing ; without it, many of the sailors would dread return- 
ing with a scarcity of fish, or that they might nor return at 
all. So, too, a Spanish admiral, before setting out to sea, 
consecrates his fleet to the Virgin, and his crews believe that 
the Mother of Jesus will assure them the victory. But among 
primitive peoples other ceremonies of a similar kind take 
place, and these we do not understand, because the effect 
expected is not among those we should look for. Then we 
miss the analogy, and we realize that the explanation it fur- 
nished was superficial and inadequate. These are precisely 
the ceremonies which best enable us to penetrate the real 
character peculiar to a mentality which is prelogical and 
mystic. 

Among them are the ceremonies which have for their aim 
the securing the regularity of the seasons, the normal pro- 
duction of the harvest, the usual abundance of fruit and of 
animals used for food, etc. Here we recognize one of the 
essential differences between their mentality and our own. 
To our way of thinking, “‘ Nature ” constitutes an objective 
order which is unchangeable. The savant, no doubt, has 
a clearer and more rational idea of it than the unlettered : 
but as a matter of fact, the idea obtrudes in familiar fashion 
on all minds even without their reflecting upon it. And it 
matters little whether this order is conceived as having been 
created and maintained by God, since God Himself is regarded 
as unchanging in His decrees. Action is regulated therefore 
by the idea of an order of phenomena subject to certain laws 
and exempt from any arbitrary interference. 

To the primitive’s mind, however, ‘“‘ Nature,’ in this sense, 
is non-existent. The reality surrounding the social group is 
felt by him to be a mystic one: in it everything relates, not 
to laws, but to mystic connections and participations. Doubt- 
less these do not, in general, depend any more upon the 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 247 


goodwill of the primitive than the objective order of Nature 
in our case depends upon the individual who imagines it. 
Nevertheless, this objective order is conceived as based upon 
a metaphysical foundation, whilst the mystic connections and 
participations are simultaneously imagined and felt as solidary 
with the social group, and dependent upon it as it depends 
upon them. We shall not be surprised, therefore, to find this 
group concerned in maintaining what is, to us, the natural 
order, and that it may succeed in this, making use of cere- 
monies similar to those which secure for it its supply of game 
or fish. 

The most characteristic of these are undoubtedly the 
intichiuma ceremonies, which Spencer and Gillen have des- 
cribed in detail, and which they define thus: “‘ sacred 
ceremonies performed by the members of a local totemic 
group with the object of increasing the number of the totem 
animal or plant.” 1 I cannot give even a brief analysis of 
them here. Asa rule, they consist of a series of very compli- 
cated rites: dances, paintings, special ornaments of the 
members of the totem exclusively concerned with the cele- 
bration of the ceremony, the imitation of the movements of 
the totemic animal and efforts to realize their communion 
with it. To minds of this kind, the individuals forming part 
of a totemic group, the group itself, and the totemic animal, 
plant, or object, are all the same thing. We must understand 
“the same ” by virtue, not of the law of identity, but of the 
law of participation. We have already seen proofs of this.? 
The British Scientific Expedition to the Torres Straits affords 
others. “A... mystic affinity... is held to obtain 
between the members of a clan and their totem. This isa 
deeply ingrained idea and is evidently of fundamental import- 
ance. More than once we were told emphatically: ‘ Augud 
(the totem) all same as relation, he belong same family.’ A 
definite physical and psychological resemblance was thus 
postulated for the human and animal members of the clan. 
There can be little doubt that this sentiment reacted on the 
clansmen and constrained them to live up to the traditional 
character of their respective clans. . . . We were told that 


1 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 650. 
2 Vide Chap. II. pp. 9r et seq. 


248 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the following clans like fighting: the cassowary, crocodile, 
snake, shark . . . the ray and sucker-fish are peaceable. . 
The Umai (dog) clan was sometimes peaceable and at other 
times ready to fight, which is very characteristic of actual 
dogs.’’ And, in fact, in nearly all the islands of the Straits, 
the inhabitants would celebrate, with the help of costumes, 
masks, and dances, etc., ceremonies which were absolutely 
similar to the snfichiuma ceremonies described by Spencer and 
Gillen.? 

In the snfichiuma ceremony of the witchetty grub totem, 
the actors reproduce the actions of the mythical ancestor, the 
intermediary through which the group participates in its 
totem, and which, as a consequence, exerts a mystic influence 
upon it.3 Sometimes, even, the physical modality of this 
mystic influence can be apprehended. For instance, in the 
course of the intichiuma ceremony of the kangaroo totem, it 
may happen that the men of the totem cause their blood to 
flow over a certain rock. The effect of this proceeding is to 
drive in all directions the spirits of the kangaroos which 
used to inhabit this ground, and consequently to increase 
the number of living animals, for the kangaroo spirit 
enters into the living kangaroo just as the spirit of the 
male animal enters into the body of the female (when she is 
impregnated), 

This close solidarity (which finds no satisfactory expression 
in our language, because it is something more than solidarity ; 
it is, so to speak, a mystic participation in the same essence) 
may be extended to all the members of a given social group, 
and thus realize that which we, for want of a better term, 
shall call ‘‘ mystic symbiosis.”” In the Tjingilli tribe, Spencer 
and Gillen noted the following ceremony. ‘To make both 
young men and women grow strong and well-favoured, the 
men perform, at intervals of time, a long series of ceremonies 
. . . dealing with the various totems. There is no special 
reference to the young men or women in them, but they are 
performed solely with the idea and object of increasing the 
growth of the younger members of the tribe who are not, of 


* The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, v. p. 184. Cf. Skeat and 
Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, ii. p. 120. 

2 Ibid., v. pp. 347-9. 

3 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 171 et seq. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 249 


course, allowed either to see them or take any part in 
them.” ! 

There is some mystic participation between the rain and 
the members of the rain totem, between the water totem and 
its members, and as a result the intichiuma ceremonies will 
be performed in order to assure the regular rainfall, or the 
usual amount of water in the pools. These bear a striking 
resemblance, down to the most minute detail, to the cere- 
monies carried out, with the same end in view, by the Zuñis, 
Arapahos, and the pueblos of North America as a whole : 
ceremonies which the collaborators of the Ethnological Bureau 
in Washington have so carefully described. In Australia, as 
in New Mexico, we may see “a curved band supposed to 
represent a rainbow, a drawing also of one or more of these 
on his (the actor’s) own body, and a special one on a shield 
which he brings with him. . . . This shield is also decorated 
with zigzag lines of white pipeclay which are supposed to 
represent the lightning.’’2 Here, no doubt, we have another 
“ motif,” familiar to prelogical mentality: the mystic value 
residing in the likeness, and the power exercised over a person 
or thing by the possession of this likeness (a sympathetic 
magic which utilizes the participation between the one and 
the other). But in the infichiuma ceremonies, at any rate 
those celebrated by Australian aborigines, the appeal is simul- 
taneously and specially to another yet more profound parti- 
cipation, I mean the essential communion between the totemic 
group and its totem. As Spencer and Gillen tell us, “the 
members of a totem, such as the rain or water totem, will 
hold their snfichiuma when there has been a long drought, 
and water is badly wanted ; if rain falls in a reasonable time, 
then of course it is said to be influenced by the intichiwma. 
. . . The performance of these ceremonies is not associated 
in the native mind with the idea of appealing to the assist- 
ance of any supernatural being.’’3 We know, moreover, that 
these investigators were never able to discover, in the abori- 
ginals they studied, any idea of gods, properly so called, and 
‘in no case is there the slightest indication or leaning to 


1 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, P. 295. 
+ The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 170. 
3 Ibid. 


250 HOW NATIVES THINK 


anything which may be described as ancestor-worship. . . 
These Alcheringa ancestors are constantly undergoing rein- 
carnation so that this belief . . . practically precludes the 
development of anything like a worship.”’ ! | 

Here we are confronted with a method of acting in which 
the prelogical mystic mentality betrays itself in a different 
fashion from that seen in most of the similar practices noted 
in primitives of a more highly developed type than the 
Australian aborigines. : Nothing is more widespread than prac- 
tices having as their object the cessation of drought, and the 
assurance of rain: (we see this even yet in our own Rogations) 
but such practices usually take the form of supplications or 
prayers. Even when including, as they nearly always do, 
recourse to sympathetic magic, they are at the same time 
addressed to one. or more divine beings or spirits or souls 
whose intervention will produce the desired phenomenon. 
They feel themselves further removed from the rain than 
they do from souls or spirits or deities and they feel that 
they can influence these last and communicate with them, by 
means of prayers, fasting, dreams, sacrifices, dances, and 
sacred ceremonies of all kinds: and they do not feel that they 
can communicate directly with the rain in this way. In 
certain parts of China, for instance, as De Groot tells us, the 
people maintain the convents solely because they are con- 
vinced that they are able to regulate the winds and the rains, 
and thus assure the crops, since these are so exposed to 
drought in the treeless regions of China. . . . They subscribe 
liberally to erect and maintain the buildings, in return for 
which the monks are expected to bring about the cessation 
of the drought by means of their ceremonies, when occasion 
requires it.2 The monks, in their turn, address themselves 
to the divinities concerned, and regulate the fung-shui. Among 
the Australians, on the contrary, we find no priests or inter- 
mediaries of any kind. The intichiuma ceremony manifests 
the direct solidarity and mystic participation between the 
rain-totem and the rain, as it does between the members of 
the kangaroo totem and the kangaroos, and however strange 
it may seem to us, this solidarity and this participation are 


1 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 494. 
* J. J. M. de Groot, La Code du Mahayana en Chine, p. 100. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 251 


not only imagined but fel¢ collectively by the members of the 
totemic group. 

But, we may ask, supposing the rain falls without the 
ceremonies having taken place? The aborigines have quite 
unconsciously provided for such an objection. They have 
given, beforehand, the most natural and decisive answer, 
regarded from the point of view of mystic mentality. The 
imhichiuma ceremony has not been celebrated by the totemic 
group, it is true, but since the rain has fallen, it has never- 
theless taken place, for it has been celebrated by well-disposed 
spirits (truniarinia). ‘The iruntarinia are supposed fre- 
quently, but not always or of necessity, to commend in dreams 
to the Aluntaja’’ (an old man who acts as religious chief) 
“of any group the time at which it is right to perform the 
ceremony of the snfichiuma. They themselves perform 
similar ceremonies, and after a plentiful supply of, say, 
witchetty grub or emu appears without the performance of 
imhchiuma by the peoples of the respective totems, then the 
supplies are attributed to the performance of intichiuma by 
friendly truntarinia.”’* At Mabuiag, in Torres Straits, a 
similar belief is to be found. ‘The madub was a wooden 
image of human shape. . . . The business of the madub was 
to take charge of the garden beside which it was placed, and 
to give good crops of yams, etc. . . . At night time the madub 
became animated and went round the garden, swinging the 
bull-roarers to make the plants in the garden grow, and they 
danced and repeatedly sang. .. Indeed, the mari (spirits) 
of the madub do what men do.’’? According to Bergaigne, 
the Vedic sacrifice is performed in heaven as on earth, and 
with the same results.3 

There is an analogous belief which maintains that cere- 
monies having the same object as the intichiuma, are also 
performed by animals. ‘‘ As a matter of fact the Tarahumares 
assert that the dances have been taught them by the animals. 
Like all primitive peoples they are close observers of nature. 
To them, animals are by no means inferior creatures ; they 
understand magic and are possessed of much knowledge, and 


* Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Austvalia, pp. 519-21. 
? The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, v. pp. 345-6. 
3 La Religion Védique, i. pp. 12-13. 


252 HOW NATIVES THINK 


may assist the Tarahumares in making rain. In spring, the 
singing of the birds, the cooing of the dove, the chirping of 
the cricket, all the songs uttered by the denizens of the green- 
sward, are to the Tarahumares appeals to the deities for rain. 
For what other reason should they sing or call? And as 
the gods grant the prayers of the deer expressed in its antics 
and dances, and of the turkey in its curious playing, they 
easily infer that to please the gods they, too, must dance as 
the deer and play as the turkey. . . . Dance, with these 
people is a very serious and ceremonious matter, a kind of 
worship and incantation rather than an amusement... . 
The very word for dancing, noldvoa, means literally to work.” ! 
So too, according to a Hopi tradition, cockroaches dying of 
thirst dance to obtain rain.? 

In most primitive peoples rather more developed than the 
Australian aborigines, it is no longer the whole totemic group 
of the locality which secures, by the celebration of appropriate 
ceremonies, the desired result. Frequently one member of 
the group, possessing special qualifications, is the forced or 
the voluntary vehicle of the participation which is to be 
established. We noted acase of this kind in New Guinea, with 
respect to the dugong fishing. Sometimes it is an individual 
chosen expressly for this end, and doubtless indicated as the 
choice of the members of the group for some mystic reason 
or other. Sometimes he is qualified for this function by a 
special initiation which has rendered him more ready to 
receive and exercise magic influence than his fellows. And 
finally he is sometimes indicated beforehand by his birth and 
the participations it implies, since to these peoples a man 
actually zs the same as his ancestors have been, and he really 
is, at times, the reincarnation of a certain ancestor. Thus 
it is that chiefs and kings, by virtue of their origin, are very 
often the intermediaries required. By the rites which they 
perform, and which they alone are qualified to perform, they 
secure the regularity of natural phenomena and the very life 
of the group. 

It is in this way that we must interpret the numerous 


1 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, i. pp. 330-2. 
2 Voth, The Traditions of the Hopi, pp. 238-9 (Field Columbian Museum, 
Anthrop., viii. 1905). 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 253 


instances collected by Frazer in The Golden Bough, which 
show the social group almost as solicitous about the person 
of their king as a hive of bees is about the safety of its queen. 
The welfare of the group depends upon the king’s welfare. 
To the Ba-Ronga, “‘ royalty is a venerable and a sacred insti- 
tution. Respect for the chief and obedience to his orders 
are universal, and it is not the display of wealth or power 
which maintains his prestige, but the mystic belief that the 
nation lives through him as the body does through the 
head.” 1 We noted that the Mandans, according to Catlin, 
were very uneasy at the thought that their chiefs’ portraits 
might be in the hands of strangers, and this might interfere 
with their repose in the grave. In Bengal, the Banjogis and 
Pankhos affirm that “in the time of one of the rajahs, Ngung 
Jungnung, they were the dominant and most numerous of 
all the tribes in this part of the earth. . . . They attribute 
the declension of their power to the dying out of the old stock 
of chiefs, to whom divine descent was attributed.” 2 

The king, more particularly, often secures a regular rain- 
fall and the abundant harvest which is its natural result. 
“In the good old times, when there was still a Ma Loango, 
the Bafoti were certainly more prosperous. The king enjoyed 
considerably more power than others. He did not urge on 
the clouds or direct the winds: . . . he did better than that, 
for he made the rain fall direct from heaven, as soon as his 
subjects needed it.”’3 In Malaya, ‘ the king is firmly believed 
to possess a personal influence over the works of nature, such 
as the growth of the crops and the bearing of the fruit-trees.”’ 
(The same power is attributed to the British Residents.) 
“I have known (in Selangor) the success or the failure of the 
rice crops attributed to a change of district officers, and in 
one case I even heard an outbreak of ferocity which occurred 
among man-eating crocodiles laid at the door of a most 
zealous and able, though perhaps occasionally somewhat 
unsympathetic, representative of the government.”’ 4 

The mystic power of the king sometimes persists after 
his death. Thus, with the Ba-Ronga people, ‘the death of 


1 Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, p. 139. 

* Quoted by Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, iii. p. 145. 
3 Dr. Pechuël-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, p. 449. 

4 Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 36. 


254 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Mapunga must have taken place in the course of the year 
1890, but no one ever spoke of it. When the news was made. 
public, however, Manganyeli, a young native from the Ribombo 
district said to me: ‘When the miphimbi trees were so full 
of fruit last season (about Christmas, 1890)—we had an excep- 
tional crop—we thought that the chief must be dead, and that 
he had sent us this wonderful abundance.’ ”’ ! 

It is, therefore, of the greatest importance that the tribe 
should remain in communication, or rather, in communion, 
with its dead kings. Junod has very clearly shown how such 
participation between the social group and its deceased chief 
is realized both physically and mystically, and the passage is 
worth quoting in full. “In every little Ba-Ronga clan . .. 
there is a sacred object which one might be inclined to take 
for an idol, but which is in reality something quite different. 
It is called the mhamba (a word which denotes any kind of 
offering or sacrifice, but which is especially applied to such 
an object as this). It even seems as if they had such a respect 
for it that they hesitate to give it an official name. They 
prefer to call it nhlengoué (treasure, wealth). But what is 
this mhamba, this holy and mysterious kind of ark? When 
a chief dies, the nails of his hands and feet are cut off, and 
his hair and beard, and all the parts of his body which can 
be preserved are hardened with the manure formed from the 
oxen killed at the time of his death. Thus there is formed 
a sort of pellet which is afterwards wrapped round with strips 
of hide.. When the successor of this chief dies, a second pellet 
is manufactured and added to the first, and thus it goes on 
for generations. At the present time the mhamba of the 
Tembé tribe is about a foot long, according to the account 
of one who has often seen it (since it is guarded by a cousin 
of his). The guardian of the sacred relic is very carefully 
selected. He must be a man of particularly calm tempera- 
ment, not addicted to bad language or to intemperance. As 
a kind of high priest . . . he stands in a very responsible 
relation to the whole country. . . . The mysterious object is 
preserved in a building erected for the purpose, behind the 
village to which the guardian belongs. When the keeper of 
the mhamba knows that he is to make use of it for a religious 


t Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, p. 128 (note). 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 255 


ceremony, he lives in a state of entire continence for the 
previous month. As for the solemn sacrifice performed with 
the aid of this object, it is usually a goat. . . . The priest 
traces circles in the air with the mhamba. The prayer is then 
pronounced and it is of course addressed to all the former 
chiefs whose nails and hair the officiating priest holds in his 
hands: a strange and striking way of entering into com- 
munion with the gods. . . . The sacrifice with the mhamba 
is carried out (in the Tembé clan, at any rate), at the beginning 
of the bokagne season, before offering the firstfruits to the 
ghosts of the departed. In times of national danger, doubt- 
less, they have recourse to this solemn practice. 

“This amulet, therefore, of incalculable efficacy, is the 
nation’s most treasured possession. . . . Consequently it is 
the very last object which would be allowed to fall into the 
hands of an enemy. If the army is vanquished and put to 
flight, the depositary of the mhamba starts first of all... . 
The sacred emblem will not be wrested from him until the 
entire forces of the tribe have been destroyed. Such a mis- 
fortune did occur, it seems, some years ago, to the Tembé 
clan. ... Then a terrible drought ensued, and for a whole 
year the sky was of a fiery colour. ...’’ And the worthy 
pastor concludes: “ Is there not something profoundly logical 
in the idea of preserving some physical part of the mighty 
dead who have become the gods of their country, in order to 
exercise influence upon their will, and power over them? ”’1 

This account of his shows very clearly that to the collective 
consciousness of the social group, its welfare, its very existence 
and the regular order of nature are connected, by means of 
a mystic participation, with the kings and chiefs of the group\ 
We know that to the prelogical mind, governed by the law 
of participation, part of a living whole is equal to the whole, 
is, in fact, the whole, in the prelogical sense of the verb ‘‘ to 
be,” and thus we can understand the part played by the nails 
and hair of the dead kings in the mhamba. 

This recognized power, whether in the totemic groups, the 
medicine-men or the chiefs, living or dead, of consolidating 
or even of effecting, through appropriate ceremonies, the order 
of nature and the regular recurrence of generation, has a certain 


1 Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, pp. 398-401: 


256 HOW NATIVES THINK 


analogy with the continuous creation which theologians and. 
certain metaphysicians have defined by saying that without 
the Divine intervention created beings could not subsist for 
a single instant. It is indeed a participation of the same 
kind that the prelogical mind imagines, though in a more 
gross fashion. According to its view the natural order only 
endures by virtue of periodical renewals, obtained through 
the special ceremonies performed by those possessing the 
requisite mystic powers. And the social order frequently 
disappears when the king dies, until his successor has assumed 
the power: every interregnum becomes anarchy. But there 
is this difference that, according to the doctrine of continuous 
creation, though the world subsists only through God, God 
would exist without the world if the latter were to disappear ; 
whereas in the case of prelogical mentality there is complete 
reciprocity. As a rule there is absolute action and reaction 
between the totemic group and its totem, and, in a higher 
type of society, between the nation and the succession of 
kings. It is the ‘‘ mystic symbiosis’? of which we have 
already spoken, and which our logical thought cannot clearly 
conceive save in a distorted form. 


V 


The community of essence, the mystic participation, is 
not conceived and sensed between the members of the same 
totemic group merely. It exists, too, in many primitive 
peoples, between the child and its father, the child and its 
mother, and the child and both parents; and, once its prin- 
ciple has been recognized, it is translated into customs which 
express it very clearly. Of these customs the couvade is often 
the only one which claims the attention of explorers. Its 
apparent strangeness has struck them. In reality, however, 
it is but part of a sum-total of taboos or precautions 
which are imposed, sometimes on the father, sometimes on 
the mother, and sometimes on both, which begin as soon 
as the pregnancy is announced, and continue long after 
the birth of the child. We shall note but the chief of 
these only. 

“ When the wife of a Braman is in the family way, as soon 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 257 


as her husband knows it, he cleans his teeth, and eats no 
more betel nor trims his beard, and fasts until his wife gives 
birth to her child.’”’t ‘In Loango, the nganga (medicine- 
man) imposes upon the future parents, or upon the mother 
only, a taboo either simple or complicated, which they must 
observe until the child has uttered its first cry, or taken its 
first step, or even much later, until the child walks well, or 
has brothers and sisters. It may happen therefore that a 
father’s conduct is somewhat strange before, as well as after, 
the birth of his offspring.’”’ Du Chaillu tells us that “ while 
she (a female gorilla) was alive, no woman who was enceinte 
nor the husband of such woman dared approach her cage. 
They believe firmly that should the husband of a woman with 
child, or the woman herself, see a gorilla, even a dead one, 
she would give birth to a gorilla, and not to a man child. 
This superstition I have noticed among other tribes too, and 
only in the case of the gorilla.”’ 3 

At Amoy in China, the husband must be extremely cautious 
in his movements during his wife’s pregnancy. “If the soil 
is disturbed, the repose and growth of the embryo in the womb 
of women is, by the law of sympathy, disturbed also... . 
Especially perilous is it to drive a nail into a wall, as it might 
nail down the earth-spirit that resides in it, and cause the 
child to be born with a limb stiff or lame, or blind of one eye ; 
or it might paralyse the bowels of a child already born, and 
give it constipation with fatal results. The dangers which 
threaten a pregnant woman increase as her pregnancy ad- 
vances. In the end, nothing that is heavy may be displaced 
in the house, it being well known that the earth-spirits are 
wont to settle preferably in things which, owing to their 
weight, are seldom moved. But even the shifting of light 
objects is a source of danger. Instances are known of fathers 
who had rolled up their bed-mat after it had long lain flat, 
being frightened by the birth of a child with a rolled-up ear. 
One day I saw a boy with a hare-lip, and was told by the 
father that his wife when pregnant of this child, had thought- 
lessly made an incision in an old coat of his, while repairing 


t Duarte Barbosa, ‘“‘ A Description of the Coast of East Africa and Malabar 
in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century,” Hakluyt Society, xxxv. P. 1231 

2 Dr. Pechuél-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, ili. 2, p. 402 

3 Du Chaillu, Equatorial Africa, p. 262; Cf. p. 305. 


17 


258 HOW NATIVES THINK 


it.’ '—In New South Wales, “‘ certain foods are forbidden to 
women during portions of their pregnancy and lactation.”’ 2 
—In New Guinea, during pregnancy, the Jabim women abstain 
from the flesh of iguanas, cuttlefish, dogs, in short of all fat 
and rich foods, “ for fear that the child may be born dead or 
deformed.’ Amanofthe Jabim tribe is equally bound by cer- 
taininhibitions. During his wife’s pregnancy heis forbidden to 
go to sea; “ the fish avoid him, and the sea becomes rough.”’ 3 

In Brazil, ‘“‘ many Indian tribes have a custom that when 
a pregnancy is declared, the husband and wife must rigorously 
observe a fast. They must abstain from everything but ants, 
mushrooms, and water with which a little guarana powder has 
been mixed.” 4 

In the Admiralty Isles, “when a pregnant woman feels 
her confinement approaching, she stays at home, and eats 
fish and sago only. She does not eat yams lest her child 
should be long and thin; she does not touch taro, lest he 
should be short and stocky, and she abstains from pork, for 
fear that he should have bristles instead of hair.” 5 

During the accouchement certain practices show that the 
idea of the solidarity between father and child is still felt. 
For instance, in the tribes studied by Spencer and Gillen, 
when labour has begun, the father’s girdle is taken off and 
transferred to the mother. “Not a word is spoken, but if 
after a time the birth of the child is not announced, the 
husband, still quite unadorned, walks once or twice slowly, 
at a distance of about fifty yards, up and down past the 
erlukwirra (women’s camp) with a view to inducing the un- 
born child to follow him.’’® In the more northerly tribes, 
“when the father of the newborn child goes out into the 
scrub for three days, away from his camp, he leaves his waist- 
girdle and arm-bands behind him, so that he has nothing 
tied tightly round any part of his body, a state of affairs 
which is supposed to be beneficial to the lubra.”’ 7 

1 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. pp. 538-0. 

2 Mathews, “ Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria,” 
Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, p. 219 (1905). 

3 Hagen, Unter den Papuas, p. 229. 

4 Von Martius, Bettrage zur Ethnographie Stid-Amerika’s, i. p. 402. 

5 Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee, p. 398. 


6 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 466-7. 
7 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 607. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 259 


Now we come to the couvade practices, properly so called, 
which have often been described. Upon examining them in 
detail, however, we see that in the majority of cases, the 
inhibitions and the observances are imposed upon both parents. 
Explorers have laid more stress upon the father’s part in 
them, either because it is greater, as is frequently the case, 
or because the fact seems in their opinion more extraordinary 
and worthy of mention. And if the rules to be observed by 
the father are more important and more rigorous, it is because 
the community of substance between the child and himself 
are imagined and felt more vividly than that between the 
child and the mother. This participation has been well 
illustrated by Dobrizhofier, who has described the couvade 
in detail: the abstinence from food, from all violent exercise, 
etc. Otherwise, if the child dies, it is the father’s fault. An 
Indian refuses snuff, because he might injure his newborn 
child by sneezing. In short, the Abipones believe ‘ that any 
discomfort whatever, suffered by the father, influences the 
child, on account of the close sympathy existing between 
them.” 1—Von den Steinen, too, has given us a detailed 
description of the couvade, as noted by him in Brazil. ‘The 
married pair did not leave their hut save to relieve the neces- 
‘sities of nature. They lived exclusively upon pogu boiled 
into a pap, and mandioc cakes crumbled and mixed with 
water. Any other food would have been injurious to the 
child ; it would have been as bad as if the child itself ate 
meat, fish, or fruit. . . . The Indians despise those who do 
not conform to this custom. ... The father is weak and 
sickly, since he feels himself to be one with the newborn 
child. . . . Among the Bororos, not only does the father fast, 
but if the child is ill, it is the father who swallows the medi- 
cines, as we learnt from the dispenser to the Brazilian Military 
Colony, who was immensely astonished at this.”’ 2 

According to Von Martius, inhibitions are placed upon the 
father and mother alike. ‘ After the birth the father hangs 
his hammock beside his wife’s, to await, as she does, the fall 
of the umbilical cord. During this time, the mother is 
regarded as unclean, and the beds of the pair are separated 


1 Dobrizhoffer, Historia de Abiponibus, ii. pp. 231 et seq. 
2 K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvélkern Zentralbräsiliens, pp. 289-94. 


260 HOW NATIVES THINK 


by a partition of palm-leaves, if they do not occupy separate 
huts. For the whole period, neither father nor mother can 
do any work, and the father cannot leave his hut save for a 
moment in the evening. His habitual bath is forbidden... .” 
(There are certain taboos with regard to food.) “Still more 
strange is the forbidding of the scratching of the head or the 
body with the finger-nails. . . . A breach of these regulations 
would bring about the death of the nursling, or at any rate 
make him sickly for the rest of his life.” 1 

So too, in New Guinea, “ until the child can walk and 
begins to talk, the mother must follow the diet prescribed for 
her pregnancy. After her accouchement, she must not smoke 
tobacco, ‘‘ because the child would be all blackened within, 
and would die.’’ The father, too, must abstain from tobacco 
and betel-nut for a time ; however, according to what Vetter, 
who tells us this, says about it, this rule is not very strictly 
observed.2 With the people of Goa, ‘‘ during this period of 
three weeks, not only the mother but also the father is deemed 
to be impure, and is required to abstain from all his ordinary 
occupations.” 3—In South India, ‘it was noted by the Rev. 
S. Mateer, that, after the confinement of a Paraigan women 
in Travancore, the husband is starved for seven days, eating 
no cooked rice or other food, only roots and fruits, and drinking 
only arrack or toddy.” 4«—Among the Klamaths of Oregon, 
“on account of a childbirth, the father and the mother eat 
no meat for ten days.” 5 


These facts, to which we might easily add many similar 
instances, will doubtless suffice to show that all the customs 
relating to the connection between the newborn child and 
its parents, including the couvade, as well as the taboos 
affecting pregnancy, imply, at any rate originally, the idea of 
a close participation between the child just born, or about 
to be born, and its father or mother, or both. 

The case of the Bororo taking his sick child’s medicine is 
perhaps the most characteristic, because it marks the parti- 

1 Von Martius, op. cit., i. p. 643. 
2 Hagen, Unter den Papua’s, p. 234. 
3 Risley, Castes and Tribes of Bengal, i. p. 289. 


4 E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in South India, p. 550. 
5 A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 91. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 261 


cipation most clearly. But the other customs proceed, at 
least primitively, from the same collective representations. 
As certain of these customs persist—the actual couvade, for 
instance—while others perish, as their meaning is lost, one 
seeks, and naturally will find, an explanation of the extra- 
ordinary custom which obliges a man to go to bed as soon as 
his wife is confined. These more or less probable explanations 
do not hold good, however, when the couvade is once relegated 
to the sum-total of the practices to which it belongs. 

Even for a long time after the birth, even when at a dis- 
tance from each other, the participation between father and 
child can still be strongly felt. Thus, in Borneo, “ the war- 
coats of the men are often made of goat- or deer-skin, and 
any man may wear such a coat. But when a man has a young 
son he is particularly careful to avoid contact with any part 
of a deer, lest through such contact he should transmit to 
his son in any degree the timidity of the deer. On one 
occasion when we had killed a deer, a Kenyah chief resolutely 
refused to allow its skin to be carried in his boat, alleging the 
above reason.” ! 

It is at the time of the initiation of the young men—an 
initiation, as we shall presently see, which is a kind of new 
birth—that the participation between them and their respec- 
tive mothers becomes felt once more, and there are many 
customs which betray this. For instance, among the Aruntas, 
when the young man who has been circumcised is out in the 
bush, his mother ‘‘ may not eat opossum, or the larger lace 
lizard, or carpet snake, or any fat, as otherwise she would 
retard her son’s recovery. . . . Every day she rubs her body 
all over with grease, as in some way this is supposed to help 
her son’s recovery.” ? In other tribes, ‘while the boy is 
out in the bush, the mother wears alpita in her hair . . . and 
is careful also never to let her fire go out. The object of the 
former is to assist the boy to be watchful at night-time. .. . 
The alpita is the tail tip of the rabbit-bandicoot, a small 
animal which is very lively during the night, so that, of course, 
the wearing of the alpita is a sure stimulus to wakefulness. 


1 Hose and Macdougall, ‘‘ Men and Animals in Sarawak,” J.A.J., xxxi. 
p. 187. 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 250. 


262 | HOW NATIVES THINK 


(The deprivation of sleep is one of the initiation tests.) Not 
only is it efficacious in the case of the actual wearer, but it 
is effectual when worn by someone closely related to the 
individual whom it is desired to influence in this particular 
way.’ ! 

In an Australian initiation ceremony described in detail 
by Mathews, the mothers of the novices are treated in a 
special way, much resembling that accorded to mourners, and 
later to those who have been confined—which confirms the 
idea that initiation comprises an apparent death and a new 
birth. “At the camp the mothers of the novices belonging 
to each contingent occupy quarters by themselves a little 
distance from the camp of their own tribe. Every mother 
has a fire of her own, and no one else is permitted to use it. 
. . . Their sisters, or mothers’ sisters, or some of the older 
women provide them with food, and attend to their wants 
generally. These women are collectively known as yanniwa, 
and none of the other women or the children are permitted 
to interfere with them. Each mother eats the whole of the 
food brought to her, as it would bring evil upon her son if 
she gave any portion of it to the other women present. All 
the mothers are, however, very abstemious with their food 
whilst their sons are away.’’? In the province of Victoria, 
“the mothers of the novices eat practically the same kind 
of food which is given to their sons in the bush, and must 
remain silent the same as their sons. They sing the pre- 
scribed songs every morning at dawn, and every evening at 
dusk ; and whilst standing singing they lift burning sticks 
from off the fire and wave them repeatedly towards the direc- 
tion in which they suppose the camp of the novices to be 
situated.” 3—Finally, in New South Wales, “ during the time 
a youth is out in the bush with the old men, going through 
the initiation ceremonies, he must only eat certain kinds of 
food, and his mother and father are restricted to the same 
diet as he. And when a novice is released from any taboo 
regarding food, his mother is freed at the same time.” 4 


* Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, P. 344. 

? Mathews, “The Burbong or Initiation Ceremony,” Journal of the Royal 
Society of New South Wales and Victoria, pp. 131-51 (1898). 

3 Id., “‘ Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria,” Journal 
of the Royal Society of New South Wales and Victoria, PP. 317-18 (1905). 

4 Id., Thurrawal and Thoorga Tribes, p. 259 


CHAPTER VII 


INSTITUTIONS IN WHICH COLLECTIVE REPRE- 
SENTATIONS GOVERNED BY THE LAW OF 
PARTICIPATION ARE INVOLVED (II) 


INTRODUCTION 


THERE are certain practices, the meaning of which, at any 
rate as far as their object is concerned, does not admit of 
doubt: such are those which aim at treating the sick, pre- 
venting the disease from having a fatal issue, and restoring 
the sufferers to health. Here again we shall see, when we 
study the practices almost universally followed by primitive 
peoples, that they confirm the results yielded by an analysis 
of their collective representations. Once more we perceive 
the mystic orientation, the preconceived ideas which allow 
observation and experience but a very limited area of 
influence, the connections between entities and phenomena 
dominated by the law of participation. The facts vary 
greatly in detail, and yet when they are referred to the mental 
conditions upon which they depend, they will be found fairly 
uniform. I shall preferably select those which most clearly 
demonstrate these mental conditions. 


1 

À. In the first place, the very notion of illness is a mystic 
one. That is, illness and disease are always regarded as the 
product of an invisible, intangible agent, pictured, moreover, 
in many different ways. Observers are unanimous upon this 
point. “We must carefully avoid thinking that the Fijian 
conceives of illness as we do. To his mind, illness is like a 
wave, an outside influence which weighs down upon the sick 


264 HOW NATIVES THINK 


man and seems to possess him. This wave, this influence can 
only proceed from the gods or the devils or from living beings ; 
but from natural causes, such as cold or heat, hardly ever... . 
There is no natural cause for sickness to the Fijians; they 
seek it practer naturum, 1.e. in an invisible world, existing 
side by side with this.’”’* The expressions which Father 
Rougier makes use of are noteworthy. To our minds, indeed, 
this invisible world can only be co-existent with, yet outside, 
that which we call nature. That which, on the contrary, 
characterizes prelogical mentality, as I conceive of it, is that 
in its collective representations these two worlds make but 
one. Its mystic elements are quite as natural as the others 
which participate in them. Junod the missionary helps us 
to perceive this participation beneath the distinction he is 
endeavouring to establish. ‘‘ The native regards diseases not 
only as physical disorders, but as the result of a kind of natural 
malediction of a more or less spiritual nature, and that is 
why the patient must not only be treated for such and such a 
symptom, but he must have the defilement which he has under- 
gone removed. When he effects this second cure, the healer 
has become what is popularly called a medicine-man. Hence 
all his efforts to appear a supernatural personage, (his costumes, 
paraphernalia, etc.). . . . All these accessories inspire both 
fear and confidence in his clients.’’2 The illness, however, 
does not require the separate, successive intervention of 
healer and sorcerer. It is the mystic conception the native 
has of it which involves the need of mystic methods of sub- 
duing it and escaping from its hold. 

This mystic idea may be of almost infinite variety. In 
Loango, for instance, the natives affirm that ‘something 
takes the man by surprise, enters into him and ill-treats him. 
This something may be powers or malign influences or 
poisons—which emanate from natural objects, places, solid or 
liquid foods—but also from fetishes, men, wizards. They 
may also be souls of any kind, which brush against the sick 
man and slip into him, or else definite souls which feed upon 
his vital forces, cause him pain, paralyse him, and trouble 


1 Em. Rougier, ‘ Maladies et Médicins à Fiji Autrefois et Aujourd’hui,” 
Anthropos, ii. pp. 69, 999 (1907). 
2 Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, p. 375. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 265 


his mind, etc.” In Laos, “all illnesses, whatever they 
may be, from the smallest to the most serious ailment, pro- 
ceed either from an angry spirit, or else from a dead person 
who is displeased. . . . Thay medicine knows scarcely any- 
thing of natural causes.” 2—In Bombay, we are told, that 
whatever be the illness which attacks man, woman or child, 
or even cattle, the Kolies imagine that it arises from the action 
of an evil spirit or an offended deity; and at the end of a 
certain period, after having vainly endeavoured to cure the 
malady by remedies known to them, they consult an exorcist 
able to expel evil spirits.3 At Bahr-el-Ghazal, “even where 
disease is not directly attributed to the machinations of 
enemies, the idea of ‘ possession’ seems to hold.” 4 In short, 
without laying further stress upon facts that are well known, 
the sick man is a prey to some malign power or influence. 

B. The practices relating to diagnosis are the direct out- 
come of this mystic idea of illness. It is important to discover 
what malign power or influence has taken possession of the 
sick man; what witchcraft is being exercised upon him; 
what being, living or dead, grudges him his life; and so on. 
This diagnosis, upon which everything else depends, can only 
be made by a man who is qualified to come in contact with 
mysterious forces and spirits, and who is powerful enough 
to fight them and expel them. The first step, therefore, 
is to appeal to the medicine-man, shaman, wizard, doctor, 
exorcist, or whatever he may be called; and if this person 
consents to undertake the cure, his first care will be to put 
himself into the special state necessary to be able to communi- 
cate with forces and spirits, and effectively exercise upon them 
his potential influence. This necessitates a whole series of 
preliminary operations which may last for several hours, 
or even a whole night. There must be fasting, or intoxication ; 
a special costume; magical adornments ; incantations ; 
dances to the extent of complete exhaustion and excessive 
perspiration ; until at last the “‘ doctor ’’ seems to lose con- 


t Dr. Pechuél-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, ili. 2, pp. 443-4. 

: A. Bourlay, ‘‘ Les Thay ’’ (Laos), Anthropos, ii. p. 620 (1907). 

3 A. Mackintosh, ‘‘ An Account of the Tribes of Mhadeo-Kolies,’’ Trans. 
of Bombay Geo. Soc. (1836), i. p. 227 (1864 edit.). 

4 Cummings, “‘ Sub-tribes of the Bahr el Ghazal Dinkas,” /.4.1., p. 156 


(1904). 


266 HOW NATIVES THINK 


sciousness or be “‘ beside himself.” Then there takes place 
what we should call the “doubling” of his personality. 
He has become unconscious of his entire surroundings, but 
on the other hand he feels himself transported to the world of 
intangible, invisible realities—the world of spirits—or at any 
rate he enters into communication with it. It is at this 
moment that the diagnosis is accomplished, intuitively, and 
consequently without any possibility or error: the patient 
and his entourage believe in it blindly. Here is one example 
among hundreds. “The most important among the para- 
phernalia of the shaman”’ (when about to treat a sick man) 
‘‘is a head-dress made of a mat, which is worn in his incanta- 
tions. . . . Before putting it on they blow on it, and sprinkle 
it with water which has been poured over magic herbs. As 
soon as the shaman puts on the head-dress, he ‘ acts as though 
he was crazy,’ i.e. he puts himself into a trance by singing 
the song he had obtained from his guardian spirit at the 
time of his initiation. He dances until he perspires apa 
and finally his spirit comes and speaks to him.” 1 

Since the diagnosis thus depends upon mystic price 
both necessary and adequate, very little attention is paid to 
physical symptoms. ‘‘In West Africa,” says Nassau, “ this 
diagnosis is not made by an examination and comparison of 
the physical and mental symptoms, but by drum, dance, 
frenzied song, mirror, fumes of drugs, and conversation with 
the spirit itself.” With the Cherokees, ‘ the description . . 
is always of the vaguest character, while in general the name 
given to the disease by the shaman expresses only his opinion 
as to the occult cause of the trouble. Thus they have definite 
names for rheumatism, toothache, boils, and a few other 
ailments of like positive character, but beyond this their 
description of symptoms generally resolves itself into a state- 
ment that the patient has bad dreams, looks black around 
the eyes, or feels tired, while the disease is assigned such 
names as “when they dream of snakes,’ ‘when they dream 
of fish,’ “when ghosts trouble them,’ ‘ when something is 
making something else eat them,’ ‘ when the food is changed,’ 


* F. Boas, “ The North-west Tribes of Canada,” Reports of British 
Association, pp. rats —6 (1890). 
2 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 215. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 267 


i.e. when a witch causes it to sprout and grow in the body of 
the patient or transforms it into a lizard, frog or sharpened 
stick.” 1 

Moreover, this indifference concerning physical symptoms 
also proceeds from the mystic idea of illness. The seat of 
the malady is not within the body or the visible organs: it 
is the mind or spirit which is attacked. Thus, in West Africa, 
“the dogma that rules his (i.e. the doctor’s) practice is that 
in all cases of disease in which no blood is showing, the patient 
is suffering from something wrong in the mind.” 2—According 
to the Iroquois, “‘ every illness is a desire of the mind, and 
one does not die unless the desire is unfulfilled.—In Acadia, 
the sick man is refused nothing he asks, because in such a 
state his desires are orders from the guardian spirit,—and 
when wizards are called in, it is because they can best learn 
from the spirits the cause of the trouble and the suitable 
remedy. . . . It is the wizard’s duty to discover the sorcery 
which has caused the illness. He begins by putting himself 
into a perspiration, and when he is tired of shouting, writhing 
about, and invoking his guardian spirit, the first extraordinary 
thing that occurs to his mind is regarded by him as the cause 
of the trouble. Many of them, before beginning to sweat 
profusely, take a certain beverage which is calculated to help 
them to receive celestial impressions.” 3 

C. The treatment. We can readily see that, whatever it 
may be, it is valuable solely on account of its mystic virtue. 
Its efficacy depends entirely upon connections and partici- 
pations of a spiritual or a magic kind. As a consequence, 
the therapeutics of white people are valueless. Their remedies 
may possibly do harm (on account of the unknown mystic 
proprieties in them); it is certain they can do no good, 
and they are quite ineffectual in dealing with the maladies 
of primitives. ‘‘ There is a woman here, ill for the last year. 
I went to her several times and asked her if she were willing 
to take medicine; her reply was ‘ the devil has caused this 
illness to me, and it cannot be cured by medicine. The 
tamtluanas (witch-doctors) only can cure me by driving the 


1 J. Mooney, ‘ The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., 


Vil. pp. 337; 368. 
? M. Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 169. 
3 Charlevoix, Journal d'un Voyage dans l’ Amérique Septentrionale, iii. p. 367. 


268 HOW NATIVES THINK 


212907 


devil out of me. The strong repugnance felt to European 
remedies, of whatever kind they may be, is very general. 
From the prelogical point of view, this is inevitable, and we 
must remember that as a matter of fact the event often 
justifies it, especially in the case of individuals belonging to 
the most primitive types. In Victoria, for instance, “one 
doctor confessed that as a general rule, every time he had 
taken any sick native under his especial care, he succeeded 
only in killing him the sooner. . . . Taken to the bush, they 
rapidly recover.”” Why should this be so? “In the first 
place, in the hospital there is the feeling of loneliness; his 
spirits droop. Then... his hair, perhaps, has been cut, 
his old clothes taken away from him, and with them probably 
some valued possession on which his heart is set.” (He feels 
himself at the mercy of strangers who may exercise all sorts 
of sinister influences upon him without his being aware of it.) 
‘ He fears the white man, dreads his medicines, and shrinks 
from the outward applications which may, for aught he knows, 
be possessed of secret properties that will cause his destruc- 
tion.’’2 Certain observers have clearly penetrated the reason 
for this dislike. Of New Zealand, Elsdon Best writes: 
“A great distrust of European doctors is manifest in this 
district. It is probable that this is not due to any disbelief 
in the medical knowledge of the said profession, but that the 
natives have an instinctive fear that a doctor will interfere 
with the state of tapu, that the life principle will be endangered 
by the methods of the Europeans being employed. A middle- 
aged woman of this district was taken seriously ill at Rotorua, — 
and it was proposed that she should be sent to the hospital. 
Her people strongly objected, urging her to adhere to native 
customs, saying that they would rather see her die than be 
operated upon by a European. However, she was taken to 
hospital by Europeans, was operated upon, and recovered. 
When she returned here, I heard an old woman asking her : 
‘ In what state are you now?’ (meaning ‘is your fapu, your 
vital principle untouched ?’) The reply was: ‘O! every 
vessel of the white men has been passed over me.’ (Her 
body had been washed with water heated in a kitchen, 


x Solomon, ‘‘ Diaries Kept in Car Nicobar,” J.A.J., xxxii. pp. 231-2. 
2 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, i. pp. 259-60. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 269 


and there is no stain worse than that.) Her fapu has gone, 
and she is clinging with great earnestness to European ways 
and customs as a means of protecting her vitality. But 
this is a rare case.’’! 

On the other hand, the Australian aborigines have infinite 
faith in the methods of treatment pursued by their native 
doctors, though admitting they could neither cure nor harm 
Europeans. “ To prove the imposture practised upon them by 
their Baangals, I have offered myself as a subject to be 
operated upon by any of them they might select, telling 
them that it would not be necessary to complete the process 
to prove their case, the mere fact of my being made slightly 
ill would be proof to me perfectly conclusive that their Baangals 
were all they claimed to be.—To them this offer of mine seemed 
so ridiculously absurd, they merely laughed at me, saying : 
‘Stupid ears you. Too much you white fellow. Not that one 
Baangal belonging to you. What for you stupid head ?’”’ 2 

Whatever may be the treatment prescribed for the sick 
man, the medicines he is to take, the regimen he must follow ; 
whether he is to have steam baths, phlebotomy, or, in certain 
cases, trepanning—it is the mystic forces alone to which their 
efficacy will be due. All investigators are agreed upon this 
point. Thus, the Dayaks “ don’t prize any drug, unless it be 
covered with mysterious passes, with numberless instructions 
of how to take it, in what position, and what incantation to 
repeat when looking at it. They can’t set a value or trust 
on anything, unless it is connected in some measure with 
the supernatural,’’3 To the Negritos of the Philippines, 
‘“‘all disease is caused by spirits, which must be expelled 
from the body, before a cure can be effected.” #—Nassau is 
very definite about this. “To a sick native’s thought the 
alleviant medicinal herb used by the doctor and its associated 
efficiency-giving spirit evoked by the same doctor are insepar- 
able. . . . It is plain that the component parts of any 
fetich are looked upon by them as we look upon the drugs of 


t Elsdon Best, ‘‘ Maoiri Medical Lore,’’ Journ. of Polyn. Soc., xiii. pp. 
223-4 (1904). 
2 Beveridge, ‘‘ The Aborigines of the Lower Murray,”’ Journal of the Royal 
Society of New South Wales, p. 70 (1884). 
3 Brooke, Ten Years in Sarawak, ii. pp. 228-9. 
W.A. Reed, The Negritos of Zambales, p. 68 (Manila, 1904). 


270 HOW NATIVES THINK 


our materia medica. It is plain, also, that these drugs are 
operative, not, as ours, by certain inherent chemical qualities, 
but by the presence of a spirit to whom they are favourite 
media. And it is also clear that the spirit is induced to act 
by the pleasing enchantments of the magic doctor.’”’! Miss 
Kingsley expresses the same idea in a forcible way. “‘ Every- 
thing works by spirit on spirit; therefore the spirit of the 
medicine works on the spirit of the disease. Certain diseases 
are combatable by certain spirits in certain herbs. Other 
diseases are caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling 
spirits ; they must be tackled by spirits of a more powerful 
grade.” 2 
7 We must also take into account the fact that prelogical 
mentality does not deal with concepts as rigidly defined as 
those of our own thought. There is no clear-cut distinction 
between the mystic influence which, by means of certain 
processes, causes or cures a malady, and that which, without 
being of a medical nature, produces the same kind of effects, 
by altering the physical or moral disposition of men, animals, 
or invisible beings. Thus we have here a very general, though 
not abstract and truly conceptual, idea, similar to the con- 
ceptions of mana, wakan, orenda, mulungu, and others which | 
we have already studied. Some observers have remarked 
this particularly. ‘If the doctor and the magician are usually 
confused, the confusion is due to the fact that the concept 
of mori (medicine) is an extremely vague one. Mori does 
not stand for the medicinal plant, the healing herb alone; 
it means, too, magic methods of all kinds, among them those © 
which change the will-power. The heathen are convinced 
that if their children become Christians, it is because they 
have had a medicine, a mov1, administered to them; it is 
mort which makes abandoned girls attractive. Everything, 
even the powder with which the whites clean the rust off 
their weapons is mort.’ 3 

Very frequently, when the “doctor” has finished his 
incantations and his magic practices, when he is in communi- 
cation with the spirits, he applies his lips to the diseased 


1 Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, pp. 81, 162. 
2 West African Studies, p. 153. 
3 Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, p. 468 (note). 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 271 


part, and after more or less prolonged suction, triumphantly 
produces, before the patient and his friends, a small piece 
of bone or stone or coal or some other substance. They all 
believe that he has extracted it from the patient’s body, and 
that the cure is thereby assured, and even accomplished. 
We may compare this act to that of a surgeon showing his 
students a tumour which he has just removed, but the analogy 
is merely external. The fragment of bone or stone which 
the “doctor ”” takes out of his mouth is not the ill that the 
patient is suffering from ; it is not even the cause ; it is merely 
the vehicle of it. 

‘The idea that pains are caused by foreign bodies 
embedded in the flesh of the sufferer is widely spread among 
uncivilized people throughout the world, as has long been 
known; but, as far as I know, it has not been noted that 
this foreign substance—at least among the Indians of Guiana 
—is often, if not always, regarded, not as simply a natural 
body, but as the materialized form of a hostile spirit.’’ : 

The true cause of the evil is the malign influence, the 
sorcery or witch-craft which has introduced into the body, 
with this fragment of bone or this stone, a principle of decay. 
Its extraction betokens the superiority of the ‘“ doctor’s”’ 
influence over this noxious principle: it is the visible sign of 
victory. But this victory is as mystic as the evilitself. It is 
always, as Miss Kingsley says, the working of spirit upon spirit. 

Nothing illustrates this characteristic of  prelogical 
mentality better than the medical practices of the Cherokees, 
the formulas of which, with their explanation, Mooney 
received from the lips of the Indians themselves. Let us 
take, for instance, the formula respecting the treatment of 
rheumatism. It is composed of two parts: the first consists 
of invocations addressed in turn to the red, blue, black, and 
white dogs; the second gives a detailed prescription, showing 
how to prepare and to take the medicine.? This formula is a 
“particularly explicit”? one. It would, however, be quite 
unintelligible, at any rate in its first part, without the explana- 
tions afforded by the ideas, already noted, which Indians 


* Im Thurm, Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 333. 
? J. Mooney, “ The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee,” E. B, Rept., 
vii. pp. 346 et seq. 


272 HOW NATIVES THINK 


have respecting maladies and the way in which they must 
be combated. 

The Cherokees’ most common belief with respect to 
rheumatism regards it as caused by the spirits of animals 
which have been slain, generally by those of deer, anxious 
to avenge themselves on the hunter. The malady itself, 
called by a figurative name signifying ‘‘ the one who enters,” 
is regarded as a living being. The verbs used in speaking of 
it demonstrate that this being is long and narrow, like a 
snake or a fish. It is brought by the chief of the deer, which 
makes it enter the hunter’s body (particularly his limbs and 
extremities) and immediately intense pain is felt. The 
‘intruder ’’ cannot be chased away save by some animal- 
spirit stronger than, and a natural enemy of, the deer: as a 
rule, by the dog or the wolf. These animal-deities live in a 
higher clime, above the seventh heaven, and are the great 
prototypes, of which the animals on earth are but faint — 
reflections. As a rule, they dwell at the four cardinal points, 
each of which has a mystic name and a colour peculiar to 
all that pertains to it. (Here we recognize those complex 
participations which are always expressed in the collective 
representations of primitive mentality.)' Thus the east, 
north, west, and south are respectively the countries of the 
sun, the cold, the darkness, and wa’hd la’ ; and their colours 
are red, blue, black, and white. The white and red spirits are 
usually invoked to obtain peace, health, and other benefits 
of this sort ; red alone, the success of an enterprise ; blue, to 
unmask and defeat an enemy’s plans; black, to secure his 
death. The red and white spirits are regarded as the most 
powerful. 

That being so, in the formula for rheumatism the doctor 
first invokes the Red Dog in the country of sunshine, “ as if 
he were a long way off,” begging him to come quickly to the 
aid of the sufferer; then supplication gives place to the 
assertion that the Red Dog is there, and that he has removed 
part of the evil to the other end of the world. In the para- 
graphs which follow, the Blue Dog of cold, the Black Dog of 
darkness, the White Dog of wahala, are invoked in the same 
way, and each carries off part of the trouble. . . . 

t Vide Chap. V. p. 211. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 273 


As a rule, the formulas have four paragraphs. This one 
is exceptional, and has five. 

Then the physical part of the treatment is set forth. The 
remedy consists of a warm decoction made from the roots 
of four sorts of ferns, with which the patient is rubbed. This 
rubbing is done four times by the doctor, who at the same 
time recites the formula of invocation in a subdued voice: 
the first at dawn, the last at noon. Four is the sacred number 
which appears in all the details of these formulas—thus, 
four spirits are invoked in four paragraphs; the doctor 
breathes four times on the part attacked; there are four 
herbs in the decoction; four rubbings; and often taboos 
are imposed which last for four days. 

Another Cherokee formula is for the treatment of those 
whom “something is causing something else to eat them.” 
This malady especially attacks children of tender years. 
Its symptoms are excessive restlessness and disturbed sleep, 
the child waking suddenly and beginning to cry. What 
causes this illness? The birds. A bird has cast its shadow 
over the little one, or several birds have “‘ gathered in council ” 
in its body. (This latter is a favourite expression in these 
formulas to indicate the great number of the disease animals. 
They have “‘ formed a settlement or established a townhouse ” 
in the patient’s body.) ‘ The disease animal, being a bird or 
birds, must be dislodged by something that preys upon birds ; 
and accordingly the Blue Sparrow Hawk and the Brown 
Rabbit Hawk from above are invoked to drive out the 
intruders. . . . The remedy consists of a hot decoction of the 
bark and roots of certain plants. The bark is always taken 
from the tree on its eastern side, and the roots most fre- 
quently, if not always, selected from the same side. The 
bark and roots are not pounded, but merely steeped in hot 
water for four days. The child is then undressed and washed 
all over with this decoction, night and morning, for four 
days ME 


1 It should be noted that in other places also we find a belief that the 
hunter’s illness is caused by the vengeance of the game. Thus, among the 
Bororo of Brazil, “a hunter falls ill or dies, who has done him this bad turn ? 
It is the spirit of an animal he has killed which is taking its revenge.” (K 
von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvôlkern Zenträlbrasiliens, p. 399.) Cf. 
Schoolcraft, Information, etc., ii. p. 180. 

2 The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee, pp. 355-0. 


18 


274 HOW NATIVES THINK 


D. The materia medica used by the “ doctors’”’ and the 
medicine-men of primitive communities suggests similar 
reflections. Their knowledge of simple remedies varies very 
much. In some cases their skill amazes explorers ; in others, 
like the Cherokees, for instance, their actual resources are very 
scanty. But even supposing that for a certain disease they 
should prescribe the same medicine as our doctors would 
do, they would do it in quite another spirit. Nearly always 
the chief consideration, for them, is to expel the influence or 
spirit whose presence causes the trouble, or to make the 
sufferer participate in some known or supposed virtue in 
the remedy which will enable him to surmount it. In the 
latter case it is ‘‘ sympathetic ’”’ therapeutics, practised almost 
everywhere, and which European practitioners were still 
employing three centuries ago. To take but one example 
only, in British Columbia, ‘“ decoctions of wasps’ nests or 
of flies are drunk by barren women, to make them bear — 
children, as both bring forth many young.” ! Facts of this 
kind, as we know, are very numerous. 

In any case, the healing virtues of the drug are as a rule 
governed by a good many conditions. If it is composed 
of plants, they must have been gathered by certain persons, 
at a given moment, with special incantations and instruments, 
the moon being in such and such a phase, etc.: if these 
conditions are not fulfilled, the remedy will not operate. 
In Canada, “before the departure of a war-like expedition 

. . the whole village being assembled, one of these medicine- 
men declares that he will communicate to the roots and the 
plants of which he has a large store, the power of curing all 
sorts of wounds, and even of raising the dead to life. They 
immediately begin to sing; other tricksters reply, and it 
is supposed that during the concert, which is accompanied 
by many contortions on the part of the actors, the healing 
virtues are bestowed upon the drugs.” »—Among the Chero- 
kees, the “ doctors’’ who go in search of the plants and 
bark and roots must conform with very complicated conditions, 
which Mooney has not been wholly able to give in detail. 


1 F, Boas, “ The North-west Tribes of Canada,” Reports of the British 
Association, p. 577 (1890). 
* Charlevoix, Voyage dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, iii. pp. 219-20. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 275 


The shaman must be provided with a number of white and 
red beads, (of the kind which play an important part in 
magical operations, when they begin to move in the shaman’s 
hands, for then the Indians believe that they are alive). He 
must approach the plant from a certain direction, going 
round it from right to left one, or four, times, reciting certain 
prayers all the time. Then he pulls up the plant by the roots, 
drops one of his beads in the hole, and covers it over with 
soil. . . . Sometimes the shaman must leave the first three 
plants he sees, and take the fourth only, after which he may 
go back to the three others. The bark is always removed 
from the eastern side . . . because it will have received more 
healing power by being subjected to the sun’s rays.! 

If the sufferer is cured, all goes well, and the professional 
healer receives the promised guerdon and an expression of 
gratitude from the relatives. But if, in spite of his efforts, 
the issue is unfavourable, it rarely happens—though cases 
have been known—that he is held responsible. In certain 
communities where there already is some slight degree of 
political organization the task of looking after kings and great 
personages may be fraught with danger. In more primitive 
societies, failure is as a rule attributed to “the malignant 
action of a superior magic on the part of some hostile spirit 
or individual.’ The medicine-man will not be alarmed, 
but a fresh question will arise: what is the spirit, and above 
all who is the enemy whose witchcraft has proved so power- 
ful? But in a general way, since the idea of illness, its 
causes and its treatment, remains a mystic one, the failure of 
the efforts made for the patient are accounted for as easily 
as their success. It is the more powerful “‘force’’ or 
“influence” or “ spirit’? which triumphs, establishing or 
rupturing participations upon which life and death depend. 
According to the primitive’s mentality, nothing is more 
natural. 

Finally, certain observations made prove that the dis- 
tinction between maladies of mystic origin and those pro- 
ceeding from causes which we should call natural, has begun 
to be instituted: either the same malady arises from a 


1 J. Mooney, The Sacred Formalas of the Cherokee, p. 339. 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 531. 


276 HOW NATIVES THINK 


mystic or non-mystic cause, according to circumstances, or 
else they recognize categories of maladies which are originally 
different. With the Kafirs, for instance, ‘when a witch- 
doctor has diagnosed a case of illness, there are three possible 
conditions: firstly, the malady may have arisen of itself; 
secondly, the spirits of his ancestors have caused it; thirdly, 
it is due to witchcraft.”* Among the Bahima, “sickness 
is accounted for in four ways: (1) It is thought to be caused 
by the departed king, who has been offended in some way ; 
the Mandwa (chief priest to the king) is the only person who 
can assist in such a case: paralysis is attributed to this 
source. (2) It is set down to witchcraft (kuloga), which is 
practised by a person with the desire to kill another secretly : 
(this may be any form of disease). (3) The fever is due 
to natural causes; no person is held responsible for it. 
(4) Illness is attributed to ghosts (muzimu), which take 
possession of people for various causes, and have to be 
exorcised.’ These classifications are somewhat confused, 
apparently ; yet they mark a transition from the wholly 
mystic idea of illness and the treatment which must be applied 
to it, to the methods of thought and action in which observa- 
tion and experience have a little more hold. 


IT 


The mystic idea of illness has a number of corresponding 
customs which testify to the same prelogical mentality. 
So, too, the equally mystic idea of death finds its expression 
in a number of customs relating to the dying and dead, which 
have been noted by investigators in most primitive peoples, 
and which would be altogether incomprehensible if we could 
not interpret them by such a mentality 

In the first place, death is never natural. This is a belief 
common to the Australian aborigines and to the but slightly 
civilized tribes in the two Americas, Africa and Asia. ‘ The 
native,” according to Spencer and Gillen, ‘‘is quite unable 
to realize death from any natural cause.’ 3—‘‘ To the mind 


1 Fr, Aegidius Müller, “ Wahrsagerei bei den Kaffern,”’ Anthropos, p. 43 
(1907). 

+ J. Roscoe, ‘‘ The Bahima, a Cow Tribe of Enkole,”’ J.A.T., XXxXvii. p. 103. 

3 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 356. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 277 


of the Muganda,” says Roscoe, “ there is no such thing as 
death from natural causes. Both disease and death are 
the direct outcome of the influence of some ghost.’’ !—With 
the Fang, “‘ death is never considered due to natural causes. 
Disease followed by death is due to evus (witches).’’ ?—Du 
Chaillu says the same. “The greatest curse of the whole 
country is the belief in amemba (sorcery or witchcraft). The 
African family firmly believes death to be always a violence. 
He cannot imagine that a man who was well two weeks ago 
should now be lying at death’s door with disease, unless some 
potent wizard had interfered, and by witchcraft broken the 
thread of life and inflicted sickness.’’ 3—‘‘In ancient times 
the Cherokees had no conception of anyone dying a natural 
death. They universally ascribed the death of those who 
perished by disease to the intervention or agency of evil 
spirits and witches and conjurers who had connection with 
the . . . evil spirits... . . A person dying by disease, and 
charging his death to have been procured by means of witch- 
craft or spirits, by any other person, consigns that person to 
inevitable death.” 4 

When observers tell us that “natives are quite unable 
to realize death from natural causes,” the dictum comprises 
two statements which it would be well to distinguish. 

The first of these means that the cause of death, like 
that of disease, is always represented as a mystic one; how 
could it be otherwise? If every malady is the deed of a 
“spiritual influence ”” or ‘‘force’’ or “spirit ’’ or “ ghost,” 
which is acting upon, or in possession of, the patient, why 
should not the same cause be assigned to the fatal issue of 
the malady ? That which would really be incomprehensible 
would be for the primitive mind to conceive of a “ natural 
death.” It would be a unique idea, quite unlike all the rest. 
It would mean that this one alone, the most impressive and 
mysterious of all phenomena, should, through some totally 
incomprehensible exception, have been released from the 
mystic sheath which still encloses all the rest. 


cs 


t J. Roscoe, “‘ Manners and Customs of the Baganda,” J.A.J., xxxii. p. 40. 

2 Bennett, “ Ethnographical Notes on the Fang,” J.A.I., xxix. p. 95. 

3 Du Chaillu, Equatorial Africa, p. 338. 

4 Haywood (1823), quoted by J. Mooney, ‘“ The Sacred Formulas of 
the Cherokee,” E. B, Rept., vii. p. 322. 


278 HOW NATIVES THINK 


In this respect, there is nothing more significant than the 
well-known cases in which death has overtaken a person who 
is aware that he has violated some taboo, even inadvertently. 
Frazer has quoted a number of these ;! and here is another 
characteristic one. ‘The lad was strong and healthy, until 
one day when Mr. MacAlpine found that he was ill. He 
explained that he had ‘stolen some female opossum’ before 
he was permitted to eat it; that the old men had found it 
out, and that he should never grow up to be a man. In fact, 
he lay down under the belief, so to speak, and never got up 
again, and he died within three weeks.’’2 Here we have a 
type of “natural death ” as the primitive’s mentality regards 
it, if we may venture to lend him the expression. No less 
“natural’’ is the death which will assuredly take place if 
the man has but been lightly scratched by a weapon which 
has been bewitched. ‘‘ There is no doubt whatever that 
a native will die after the infliction of even a most super- 
ficial wound if only he believes the weapon which inflicted 
the wound had been sung over and thus endowed with 
arungquiliha. He simply lies down, refuses food and pines 
away.” Spencer and Gillen have been witnesses of many 
cases of this kind.3 The only possible cure for a man wounded 
by a “charmed” spear is the exercise of strong counter- 
magic.4—Yet more, the mere fact of stimulating the practice 
of magic suggests to an old man that he himself may have 
become contaminated, and the travellers seem to have feared 
that this idea of his might cost him his life. ‘“ After the 
old man had vigorously jerked the pointing stick towards 
an imaginary enemy, he himself was evidently rather upset, 
and told us that some of the arungquiltha or evil magic had 
gone up into his head. The natives are people of the most 
wonderful imagination, and we thought at first it was going 
to affect him seriously.’’5 But this is not a case of even a 
wonderful imagination being affected. It is the expression 
of a fear, very natural from the primitive’s point of view. 
The case of the old Australian native might be compared 
with that of a surgeon who, in giving a demonstration on a 

* The Golden Bough (2nd edit.), i. pp. 321 et seq. 

? Howitt, “On Australian Medicine-men,”’ J.A.I., xvi. Pp. 42 (note). 


3 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 537. 
4 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Pp, 675. 5 Ibid., p. 462. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 270 


corpse, thinks he has pricked himself, and may have become 
infected. 

The second assertion to be distinguished implies that 
death is never due to natural causes, because it is always 
violent ; in other words, it is always a crime, an assassination 
desired, premeditated and accomplished by a certain person 
by means of magic practices. This leads to those terrible 
and only too frequent trials for witchcraft, specially common 
in Africa, of which travellers have given such striking accounts. 
Nassau even sees in them one of the causes of the depopula- 
tion of the Dark Continent. There is no district, however, 
where this belief applies to every kind of death without 
exception. Such actions are not instituted when it concerns 
the death of children of tender age, slaves, or people of no 
importance, as arule. Inquiries are only made when dealing 
with suspicious deaths, and persons about whom it is worth 
troubling. It is true, however, that among these peoples 
there are infinitely more suspicious deaths than there are 
among us. On the one hand, the practice of magic is current 
there, and everybody makes use of it more or less. No one 
can do without it, nor has he even any idea of avoiding it: 
everyone is more or less disposed to suspect his neighbour 
of practising it upon occasion, and each in his turn becomes 
the object of a similar suspicion. On the other hand, the 
very idea, common to all, that illness and death are always 
due to mysterious influences, leads easily to the conclusion 
that the death has been a violent one, in the sense that these 
forces have been set to work by the will of an enemy. 

Hence, among primitive peoples, it often happens that the 
deaths which are the most “natural’’ in our eyes, being 
referred to mystic causes, are regarded as violent, to the utter 
disregard of all that seems to be ‘the evidence. It is a point 
upon which the difference between our mental habits and 
those of primitives is most clearly attested. In the Torres 
Straits, for instance, ‘ death from snake bite is generally 
supposed to be due to the snake having been influenced by 
a sorcerer.’’ 1—“ The natives (of Port Lincoln) are not content 
even when the cause of death is sufficiently clear, but seek 


t Seligman, ‘“ The Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery of the Sinaugolo 
(Torres Straits),” J.A.I., p. 299 (1902). 


we HOW NATIVES THINK 


to find a hidden cause. . . . A woman, while clearing out 
a well, was bitten in the thumb by a black snake. It began 
to swell immediately, and in the short space of twenty-four 
hours the woman was a corpse. Still it was asserted that 
it was not an accident, but that the deceased had pointed out 
a certain native as her murderer. Upon this evidence, which 
was heightened by the circumstance that no blood flowed 
from the wound, the woman’s husband and his friends 
challenged the accused and his friends to combat. Peace, 
however, was made; and upon the offensive side it was 
acknowledged that the woman was in error with regard to 
the guilty person. But still not satisfied that the snake 
bite should have been the cause of the death, another indivi- 
dual was suddenly discovered and accused.”’ 1 The same 
method is followed when an old man dies of senile decay: 
his relatives seek to discover whose witchcraft is responsible 
for his death, and take vengeance upon the supposed author. 
Here is a yet more characteristic case. ‘‘ The Melbourne 
natives lost a man of their tribe, generally supposed from 
natural causes. A number of the deceased’s friends resorted 
to the usual mode of trench-digging,? and strictly in accordance 
with the straw-pointing, proceeded to Joyce’s Creek, and 
there at midday attacked a party of natives who were at 
the time hunting, and killed a fine young man... . The 
friends of this young man, although eye-witnesses to his 
murder, and in the full knowledge of who the guilty party 
were, proceeded in the usual way to tie up the body and dig 
the trench. The straw pointing in the direction of the 
Goulbura, a strong party, consisting of eighteen men, were 
then equipped with spears, etc., and in about a week from 
the Joyce’s Creek tragedy a similar life was taken by this 
party in the locality named.’’ 3—However incredible such a 
fact may appear, Dobrizhofter quotes similar instances among 
the Abipones. ‘If an Abipone die from being pierced 
with many wounds, or from having his bones broken, or his 
strength exhausted by extreme old age, his countrymen all 
deny that wounds or weakness occasioned his death, and 


t Wilhelmi, ‘“ Manners and Customs of the Australian Natives,” etc. 
Roy. Soc., Vict., v. p. 191 (1860). 

2 Vide p. 282. 

3 J. Parker, in Brough Smyth’s The Aborigines of Victoria, ii. pp. 155-6. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 281 


anxiously try to discover by which of the jugglers and for 
what reason, he was killed.” ! 

Such customs as these are best suited to show clearly 
the extent to which the mentality of primitive peoples is 
oriented differently from our own. Both the Australian 
aborigines and the Abipones perceive, as we do, that very 
serious wounds will inevitably be followed by death. But 
their thought does not stop there, for their collective repre- 
sentations oblige them, as it were, by some form of pre- 
conception or preconnection, to refer the death to a 
mystic cause. The wound, then, can only be one of the 
ways in which this mystic cause fulfils its end: it might 
just as well have been a snake bite or a suffocation by drown- 
ing. It is no use stopping short at the means employed, 
The only thing that matters is the true cause, and among 
certain peoples at any rate, this cause is always mystic in 
its nature. 

The methods employed to discover this cause naturally 
correspond with the idea formed of it, and are no less 
characteristic of prelogical, mystic mentality. They have 
recourse to divination, and the guilty person indicated is 
executed on the spot. In Africa,—with the Kafirs, for 
instance—or in the French Congo, and in other parts of the 
Dark Continent, where trials for witchcraft are extremely 
common, the following is an abridged summary of the method 
of procedure. As soon as the death of an important person, 
or one that appears suspicious, has taken place, all the 


t An Account of the Abipones, ii. p. 84. 

2 In peoples slightly in advance of these, we find certain transitional 
forms. Death, like illness, is still in certain cases attributed to mystic causes ; 
but in others it is considered natural, in the current meaning of the term, 
We are told that among the Nez-Percés, for instance, the chiefs say that 
they and their sons are too great to die of themselves. There is no doubt that 
they can become ill, grow weaker, and die like others, but it is because some 
person or some malign spirit incited by him has imperceptibly brought the 
death about. This is the reason that, when a chief or his son dies, the author 
of the supposed crime must be executed. (Parker, quoted by Bancroft, The 
Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, iii. p. 157.) So, too, the 
missionary Brun says: “‘ According to what our colleagues in Equatorial 
Africa tell us, many negro tribes believe that every man’s death is caused by 
sorcerers or spirits, Among the Malinkas who surround .us, this belief is 
not so absolute, and they do attribute many deaths to their true natural 
causes, such as illness, old age, starvation, or some kind of accident.” 
(Brun, ‘ Note sur les Croyances des Malinkes. Côte Occidentale Frangaise,”’ 
Anthropos, ii. p. 948.) 


282 HOW NATIVES THINK 


relatives, servants, and often the whole population of the 
village, collect, and the ‘‘ medicine-man’”’ begins the magic 
practices which are to reveal the identity of the guilty person 
Miss Kingsley has furnished us with a striking picture of these 
dread assemblies, where the very bravest trembles at the 
thought of finding himself pointed at and, in a few seconds, 
condemned and done for,—the object of public execration 
and hatred, and without the slightest hope of establishing 
his innocence. Sometimes, indeed, he is executed on the 
spot. Sometimes he has to undergo an ordeal,—he must 
swallow a certain amount of poison, for instance—and those 
who prepare the dose have decided beforehand what its result 
shall be. Europeans who are witnesses of these dramas 
cannot but regard them as a horrible travesty of justice. 
But the tenacity with which the natives defend such practices 
proves that, in their eyes, at any rate, they are strictly bound 
up with highly important group ideas regarding illness, life, _ 
death, and social order. Thus, as they put it, they are 
“indispensable,” from the point of view of prelogical, 
mystic mentality, however ridiculous they may appear to 
our logical thought. 

In the least civilized peoples known to us, it is noteworthy 
that divination is frequently resorted to in order to discover 
the point of space in which the criminal may be found. There 
is a practice, very common in Australia, which consists of 
digging a trench in the place where the body has been buried, 
and noticing the side towards which an insect turned up by 
digging will betake itself. ‘‘ During the process of digging,”’ 
says Grey, “an insect having been thrown up, its motions 
were watched with the most intense interest, and as this little 
animal thought proper to crawl off in the direction of Guil- 
ford, an additional proof was furnished to the natives of 
the guilt of the boyl-yas of that place.’’! This is the practice 
of trench-digging recently mentioned by Brough Smyth, who 
has moreover provided us with a kind of synopsis of the 
methods employed. ‘The Western Port tribe in Victoria, 
and the tribes near Perth in Western Australia watch the 
movements of a living insect that may accidentally be turned 


1 Grey, Journal of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and West 
Australia, ii. pp. 325-6. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 283 © 


up in digging the earth; the Melbourne tribe look for the 
track of a worm or the like; the Yarra black watch the 
direction which a lizard takes ; at Cooper’s Creek the corpse 
is questioned; the tribes at the mouth of the Murray and 
at Encounter Bay rely on the dreams of a wise man who 
sleeps with his head on the corpse; and on one part of the 
Murray they watch the drying of the damp clay that covers 
the grave, and see in the line of the principal fissure where 
they are to look for the sorcerer.’’'—We are told that in 
Central Australia a day or two after the death, there is a 
ceremonious visit to the exact spot where it took place, and 
the little mound raised there, as well as the soft earth 
surrounding it, are both examined very carefully to see 
whether any trace of the criminal is to be found. “If, for 
example, a snake trace were visible, then this would be 
regarded as a sure sign that a man of the snake totem was 
the culprit, and then there would remain the task of finding 
out which particular snake man was guilty.’’ The explorers 
further relate that if no traces have been seen, the relatives 
wait until the body begins to decompose, and then the widow’s 
father and brother very carefully examine the liquid that 
has flowed from the bier upon which the body has been laid, 
for they believe that the direction taken by the liquid indicates 
that from which the murderer has come. If the liquid 
has stopped some way off, the man is still quite near, but if 
it flows to a yet greater distance, the natives know that the 
guilty person belongs to a distant tribe.? 

In New Guinea, too, among other methods of divination, 
“according to Kunze, some betel ash and a crab are put 
into the dead man’s hand, and a string is attached to his 
little finger. When the grave has been closed, the string 
is pulled, and someone walks over the grave calling out 
‘Arise!’ The movement of the string makes the crab uneasy, 
and it moves about. While moving it scatters the ash all 
around it, and from the direction in which the ash falls, the 
locality of the criminal can ultimately be found.’3 In 
Guiana, too, ‘‘ Schomburgk informs us that even the death of 


t Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, p. 28. 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 526-9. 
3 Hagen, Unter den Papua’s, p. 256. 


284 HOW NATIVES THINK 


a man who has been attacked by disease is imputed to an 
unknown kanaima, or sorcerer. He has seen the father of 
a child which had died of dropsy cut off its thumbs and toes 
and throw them into a vessel full of boiling water, which all 
the relatives watched most attentively, for it was on the side 
upon which the boiling water first threw up a finger that the 
unknown murderer was to be found.” ! 


All these practices demonstrate the peculiar importance 
attaching to spatial relations in the primitive mind. We have 
already had numerous proofs of this—in particular, of the 
care taken in most primitive languages to give the express 
distance, direction, and height, necessary to find the person 
or thing spoken of. In part, undoubtedly, this care may 
be explained by the piciorial character of languages which 
are still but slightly conceptual, but it is probably also derived 
from the attention paid by the primitive to spatial directions. . 
And this very attention arises out of the mystic value of 
the spatial directions (the cardinal points) and the manifold 
participations in which these directions are involved. Proofs 
of this have already been given,” such as the “ local relation- 
ship’’ of the Australian natives, the mystic symbolism of 
the Zuñis and the Cherokees, who attribute a colour, an 
animal, a value of its own, to each point of the compass. 
The practices we have just described rest upon the belief 
in a similar participation—so much so, that if the trace of 
a snake be discovered on soil that has recently been disturbed, 
it is assuredly a man of the snake totem who has caused the 
death ; so, too, if an insect thrown up by a digger’s spade 
crawls to the north, it is a sure sign that a man of a northern 
tribe is the criminal. If we try to regard this as a piece of 
deductive reasoning, we shall never arrive at any thing but 
an absurdity ; it is not a deduction or an argument at all, 
however; it is a mode of activity peculiar to prelogical 
mentality, and, for this very reason, almost incomprehensible 
to us. To such a mentality, there are no accidental circum- 
stances. The insect which took the northerly direction might 
just as well have crawled to the west or the south, or anywhere 


1 Von Martius, Beiträge zur Ethnographie Stid-Ameyvika’s, i. p. 651. 
2 Vide Chap. V. pp. 211 et seq. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 285 


else. If it selected the north, therefore, there must be some 
mystic participation between the spatial direction and that 
which the primitive mind is seeking to ascertain at that 
particular moment. 

That which logicians designate the fallacy of post hoc, 
ergo propter hoc, may help us to form some idea of this 
participation. An extraordinary vintage occurs in the autumn 
of a year in which a great comet has been visible during the 
summer; a war breaks out after a total eclipse of the sun. 
Even to the minds of peoples already civilized, such con- 
nections are not accidental. The relation of events to each 
other in time does not consist solely of succession ; a relation, 
difficult to analyse clearly, connects the abundance of wine 
with the comet and the war with the eclipse. Here we have 
an obstinate survival of that which we have called partici- 
pation. But minds of the most primitive type, which 
recognize no accidental relations, i.e. minds which assign a 
mystic signification to all the relations which may figure 
in their ideas say just as readily juxta hoc, ergo propter 
hoc, as they do post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Contiguity in 
space is just as much of a participation as contiguity in 
time—even more so, to the extent that such minds pay 
more attention to the spatial determination than to the 
temporal one. 

Accordingly, in those complex relations of mystic partici- 
pation which, in the mass, are to prelogical mentality what 
causality is to logical thought, juxtaposition sometimes plays 
the part which we should attribute to sequence. We are 
told by Gatschet, for instance, that it was formerly admitted 
by universal custom that Indians had the right to attack 
and slay their neighbours if an owl were heard screeching 
at night near the hut of the latter. And from a brief 
tale of the Klamath Indians we learn, too, that a dog having 
howled outside a certain cabin just as the sun went down, 
an Indian appeared, to attack, wound, and finally kill its 
owner.z Here is the juxta hoc principle at work: it is parti- 
cipation, manifested by contiguity in space, between the 
Indian at whose door the animal of evil omen is heard, and 
the misfortune announced—and consequently, in a certain 

t A, Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 89. a Ibid., p. 133. 


286 HOW NATIVES THINK 


sense, caused by the animal. It is noteworthy that in 
nearly all the Indo-European languages the prepositions which 
denote ‘on account of,” ‘by means of,” are words which 
originally referred to spatial, and not temporal, relations.? 
Possibly the primitive mind at first conceived of relations of 
time as relations of position, or rather, juxtaposition, and, 
since it recognizes no relations save those which are of mystic 
significance, as participation by means of contiguity. It is 
to contiguity, accordingly, that the primitive mind clings, 
and whether the one factor of the relation precede the other 
in point of time, or follows it, is quite a secondary, and 
possibly indifferent, matter. In Torres Straits, ‘ mishaps or 
unlucky events are regarded as warnings or omens that 
something is going wrong somewhere, or wll shortly do so... 

In 1888, Nomoa, the then chief of Mabuiag, who has perhaps 
killed more dugong than any other man, one day boasted to 
me that he was invariably successful. Very shortly after . 
this, he went out to harpoon dugong, and had the misfortune 
not only to fail in attacking but also to break the dart of his 
dugong harpoon. I think he made an unsuccessful attempt 
the following day. Within three or four days, first a baby 
died in the village, and then two women. Nomoa at once 
told me that this accounted for his bad luck, and he was quite 
happy in the belief that it was not his fault that he had missed 
the dugong.” 2 There is then a mystic bond, appreciated by 
the primitive mind, between the unsuccessful fishing and the 
misfortunes which occur some days afterwards. But it would 
be difficult to say which is cause and which effect, if the cause 
is taken to mean antecedent, since the unsuccessful fishing, 
on the one hand, is accounted for by the deaths which occur 
afterwards, and, on the other hand, this unsuccessful fishing 
is the harbinger, and thus, in a certain sense, the cause of the 
deaths. 

So, too, in North America, “‘ they consider an eclipse as 
an augury of death or war or sickness: but this augury does 
not always precede the misfortune it prognosticates ; it 
sometimes follows it; for the savages, having seen the lunar 
eclipse in this year (1642) said that they were no longer 


1 Verbal communication (A: Meillet). 
2 The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, v. p. 361. 


PRIMITIVES’. PRACTICES 287 


surprised that the Iroquois had slain so many of their people 
during the winter; they saw in it the omen and the sign, 
but somewhat too late to be able to take precautions.” : 

We find similar beliefs elsewhere. In China, for instance, 
as De Groot informs us, the spirits of inanimate objects often 
manifest their baleful presence by predicting misfortunes, 
and to these simple, illogical minds, this is equivalent to 
preparing them and bringing them about. Books frequently 
tell of deaths, conflagrations or other calamities following 
upon the fact that things have tumbled over without any 
apparent cause. Here again, it is not the temporal relation 
of the two occurrences which interests the primitive mind, 
for that is mainly intent upon the mystic participation which 
unites them. 

The Lolos recognize three bad influences which inflict 
sicknesses and misfortunes. They are (1) the ghosts of those 
who have died unclean deaths; (2) demons; (3) the slo-ta, 
by which they designate any unusual appearances, phenomena 
contrary to nature, which not only portend but also cause 
disaster; they are monstrous births, hens that crow like 
cocks, etc.3—We find the same beliefs and the same practices 
in South Africa, where the negroes try to combat these 
“unusual phenomena’ by suppressing them. They call 
them “‘zlolo,”’ translated by Livingstone as “‘ transgression.” 
Albinos are generally put to death. We are told that a child 
that cuts its upper teeth before the lower was always dis- 
patched by the Bakaa, and probably by the Bakwains also. In 
some tribes, only one of twins was allowed to survive (though 
this may have been for other reasons also). If an ox, while 
lying in the pasture, beat the ground with its tail, it was treated 
in the same way, because it was believed that it had invited 
death to visit the tribe. When Livingstone bearers came 
_ through Londa, they brought a specially large breed of poultry 
with them, but if any of them crowed before midnight, it 
was guilty of #lolo, and killed.4 


1 Relations des Jésuites, xxii. pp. 191-6. 

2 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, ii. p. 664. 

3 A. Henry, “‘ The Lolos and other Tribes of West China,’”’ /.4.1., xxxiii. 
P. 104. 

4 Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 577. Cf. Baumann, Usambara und 
seine Nachbargebicte, p. 43. 


288 HOW NATIVES THINK 


III 


Accordingly, every unusual phenomenon is considered as 
a sign, and at the same time as a cause of the misfortune 
which will occur later; but, from another point of view, 
and just as correctly, this misfortune may be regarded as the 
cause of the unusual phenomenon. Therefore, if we interpret 
these collective representations by the law of causality, which 
implies an invariable and irreversible order in time between 
the antecedent cause and the consequent effect, we distort 
them. As a matter of fact, these representations obey the 
law of participation, a constitutional law of prelogical 
mentality. It is impossible to reduce to a logical analysis 
the mystic connection that unites any unusual phenomenon 
with the misfortune of which it is the sign. 

Now the phenomena which play the part, so often difficult 
to explain, of harbingers, occur but rarely, and the world. 
in which the primitive lives comprises an infinity of mystic 
connections and participations. Some of these are unvarying 
and recognized, such as the participation of the individual 
in his totem, the connections of certain animal or vegetable 
species with each other, and so forth. But how many others 
that it is of great, often of vital, interest to know, im- 
perceptibly establish themselves, or disappear. If these 
connections do not manifest themselves, their appearance 
must be incited, and this is the origin, or at least one of the 
main origins of divination. We must remember that to the 
primitive mind the external world had another orientation 
than ours; for the primitive’s perceptions are mystic, Le. 
the elements of perceptions which, to logical thought, are 
objective and alone real, are enveloped in his mind in an un- 
differentiated complex of mystic elements. And these mystic 
elements, as well as their connections, though invisible, 
intangible, and inaccessible to the senses, are nevertheless 
the most important of all. It is imperative that he should 
know all there is to know about them, and it is this end which 
is served by divination. 

To the primitive, divination is an added perception. 
Just as we employ instruments to enable us to perceive things 
which are too fine to see with the naked eye, or to supply 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 289 


senses in which we are deficient, the primitive mind makes 
use of, first and foremost, dreams, then the conjurer’s wand, 
the crystal, the ossicles, mirrors, the flight of birds, ordeals, 
and an almost infinite variety of other devices, to enable 
him to apprehend mystic elements and connections which 
do not otherwise reveal themselves. His desire for know- 
ledge is even more imperative than our own, for our general 
idea of the world could, if need be, do without the elements 
which the instruments of modern science have furnished. 
In its essential features it was constituted before these were 
discovered, whilst to primitive mentality, from its very con- 
struction, divination is absolutely indispensable. The more 
the mystic elements and connections predominate in their 
collective representations, the greater the need of mystic 
processes to enable them to be informed about them. 

As a matter of fact, no practices are more widely prevalent 
than those of divination. I do not believe that there is a 
single primitive community in which they are altogether 
wanting. Undoubtedly it is in peoples already somewhat 
civilized that we find divination as a complex and refined art, 
with a commonalty and a hierarchy of diviners. But even 
in the very lowest types we know, divination is already 
practised, at any rate by means of dreams. It is familiar 
to the Australian aborigines and to the most primitive social 
groups of the two Americas. To quote but one example 
only, we are told of a tribe of Eastern Brazil where a chief 
made it his business to harangue his followers on the eve of 
an engagement with the enemy, telling them that they must 
all recall the dreams they would have that night, and endeavour 
to have only those of good omen.! 

To represent the practices of divination as merely designed 
to reveal the future, is to define them in too limited a sense. 
It is true that among the mystic connections that these people 
seek to discover, those which determine that which is to be 
are of special importance and greater interest. It is these 
which decide whether one is to act or to refrain from acting, 
according to the circumstances of the case. But divination, 
considered in itself, refers to the past as well as to the future, 


1 “ The Captivity of Hans Stade in Eastern Brazil, 1547-1555," Hakluyt 
Soctety, li. p.108 3) Cf, D: “152, 
19 


290 HOW NATIVES THINK 


and this is proved by the important part it plays in criminal 
investigations. In the trials for witchcraft, for instance, 
the tribe and the individual offender are nearly always pointed 
out by means of divination. It is the same, too, if they seek 
to discover who has bewitched a sick man, or what evil spirit 
possesses him, where a missing article is to be found, whether 
a man who has not recently been heard of be still alive, etc. 
“The more one gets to know these tribes intimately,” says 
Junod, “‘ the more surprised one is to see how important a 
part the ossicles play in their affairs; they intervene of 
necessity in all events, however unimportant, both in the 
career of individuals and in the national life.” 1 De Groot 
remarks the same about the Chinese, and explorers in general 
do not fail to state that ‘‘ savages ”” are very ‘‘ superstitious.”’ 
That means, in our view of the matter, that they act in con- 
formity with their prelogical, mystic mentality. It would 
be surprising, and even inconceivable, ii they were not 
‘‘ superstitious. ’’ . 

With such a mentality, indeed, the consultation of the 
diviner is an almost indispensable preliminary to every 
enterprise, frequently even to those which a European would 
consider the most commonplace, such as resuming the march 
after a night passed at a stopping-place. It may happen that 
the native porters manifest the greatest unwillingness, or 
even, if they dare, refuse to start. The white traveller, (as 
Miss Kingsley remarks,) unless he knows his men’s mentality 
thoroughly, will perceive in this nothing but laziness, insub- 
ordination, failure to keep a promise, incorrigible bad faith, 
whereas it may possibly be something altogether different. 
Perhaps when they awoke, one of the negroes perceived a 
sign which augured ill either for him or for the entire company ; 
hence their stubbornness. The consultation in this case is 
offered of itself ; when not offered, it is induced. For if, by 
virtue of these invincible mysterious relations, that which 
they are about to undertake should turn out ill, it is as | 
unreasonable to risk it as it would be for us to contravene 
natural laws, the law of gravity, for instance. And how are 
they to know this, save by divination ? 

Moreover, it will not suffice to resort to it to make sure of 

1 Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, pp. 455 et seq. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 201 


the success of the enterprise as a whole ; the omens must be 
consulted and the dreams interpreted at each stage, and almost 
at every moment. This is a matter which many explorers 
have demonstrated. In war, hunting, in nearly every case 
in which individual or collective activity has some end in 
view, nothing is done without:the favourable opinion of the 
diviner, the medicine-man, the witch-doctor. If success is 
achieved it is to the strict observance of his injunctions that 
it is due. ‘ Yes,” said a Dyak chief to Rajah Brooke one 
day, “‘all my people are well off this year for padi, because 
we have paid every attention to the omens . . . and appeased 
the Antus by taking alligators, killing the pigs and examining 
their hearts, and we have judiciously interpreted our dreams. 
The consequence is a good harvest, but those who have 
neglected to do this are still poor, and must pay more atten- 
tion in the future.’’* When on a campaign, all the move- 
ments made by these same Dyaks depend upon omens. They 
cannot advance nor retreat, nor attack nor change their 
position until the auguries are known. “I have known a 
chief who lived in a hut for six weeks, partly waiting for 
the twittering of birds to be in a proper direction, and partly 
detained by his followers. . . The white man who commands 
the forces is supposed to have an express bird and lucky 
charm to guide him always; and to these the Dyaks trust 
considerably. ‘ You are our bird, we follow you.’ . . . Besides 
the whole way in adventuring, their dreams are religiously 
interpreted and adhered to. . .. I well know the names 
and can distinguish the songs of their birds... the 
effect of these signs on myself was often very marked. 
. A maia’s head (the orang-utan) was hanging in my 
room, and oe was thought to be my director to successful 

expeditions.” 
ae to Cushing, many of the Zuñi games were a 
kind of divining. For instance, the game of the hidden ball 
would be played by two camps, representing east and west, 
or north and south, and each camp consisted of members 
of the corresponding clans. The indication would be given 
by the result of the game. And since the war-dance was 
like a preliminary or a souvenir of the battle, represented 

1 Ten Years in Sarawak, i. p. 203. 2 Ibid., ii. pp. 234-5. 


292 HOW NATIVES THINK 


beforehand as a kind of drama, to determine which side 
would be victorious—so too this game, celebrating a mythical 
decision made by the gods (especially the gods of the wind 
and the gods of the water), was a means of interrogating 
fate as to which party would prevail. It would show, too, 
whether the gods of the wind or of the water would 
dominate, whether the season would be dry or rainy, and, 
according to the number of points gained by each camp, 
would reveal the extent of this drought or humidity. The 
players on one side would represent the north and the winter, 
the windy, barren season; those on the other side, the 
south and summer, fertilizing showers; the former stood for 
drought and the latter for moisture. Consequently they 
could regulate their plans according to the points gained by 
the prospective camps, and if the camp representing the 
wind won, they would take care to plant their seed deeper, 
and in well-watered spots.! | 
This interpretation of Cushing’s is valuable in more ways 
than one. Not only does it “‘illustrate”” the idea that games 
have a prophetic significance, but it shows how divination 
serves to obtain exact indications how to proeed, as well as 
a revelation of the future. Itis certainly important, above all, 
that the Zuñis should know whether they may expect rain, 
or not. For them it is almost a question of life or death, 
and many of their games, among other practices which are 
now fairly familiar in their details, have the religious, and at 
the same time, magic object of obtaining rain. They need 
to know also, however, to what extent, at what time, and 
for how long, the rain will fall. This is what divination tells 
them, when they interpret, at the same time as the result, 
properly so called, the turns of fortune in a game mystically 
undertaken between the powers of drought and of rain, the 
number of points marked to the credit of each camp, etc. 
Thus here, too, divination is an added perception. Strictly 
speaking, it is an anticipation of it, to which prelogical 
mentality trusts as much as to perception itself. Their 
confidence rests on the participations imagined and felt 
between the players, their respective clans, the spatial regions 


_* Quoted by Culin in “‘ Games of the North American Indians,” E. B. Rept., 
XXIY4/D.3 74: 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 293 


\ 
corresponding with them, their mythical animals, colours, 
gods, winds, and finally, the rain and drought themselves. 


The transition from divination to magic is almost im- 
perceptible. Both are founded upon the same collective 
representations of mystic relations: divination is primarily 
concerned to discover these relations, and magic to utilize 
them. But in actual practice, the differing aims unite once 
more, since to be able to exercise magic influence it is neces- 
sary to know these mystic relations, and, on the other hand, 
if divination seeks to discover them it is for the purpose of 
deriving advantage from the knowledge. We may even go 
further and say that all the practices we have considered 
hitherto, those relating to hunting, fishing, war, sickness, 
death, etc., and in a general way, many practices correspond- 
ing with the collective representations of primitive peoples 
are magic in their nature. I have preferred to call them 
‘“ mystic,” because this emphasizes the rigid solidarity with 
the mentality which I call prelogical and mystic, whereas 
the word ‘ magic ”” takes on meanings which vary according 
to the state of the social type studied. Thus, among 
Australian natives, or among those of South America, found 
in Brazil, Terra del Fuego, and other parts, for instance, 
the majority of the practices which correspond with their 
most important group-ideas are magical. This is very 
clearly brought out in Spencer and Gillen’s two works. In 
dealing with peoples who are more differentiated as to type, 
however, such as most of those in Equatorial and South 
Africa, the practices which are really magical are different 
from religious rites, and cannot be designated by the same 
term. There arises a differentiation of function which is 
clearly present to the collective consciousness of the group." 
Junod tells us, for instance, that there is continual con- 

fusion between “ diviner, wizard, doctor, exorcist, caster of 
lots, etc. (among the Ba-Ronga). . . . In my opinion, this 
is a serious mistake, and African ethnography ought to be 
very careful to guard against it. Undoubtedly the same 
person may be both priest, doctor, diviner, etc. But each 


1 Cf. Hubert et Mauss, ‘‘ Esquisse d’une Théorie Générale de la Magie,” 
Année Sociologique, vii. pp. 1-147. 


294 HOW NATIVES THINK 


of these functions is a different one, and the native language 
gives each a special name. . . . The most usual term is that 
of mongoma, which denotes the doctor, especially in his 
character of wonder-worker, as well as the ‘ possessed’ who 
have been cured, have undergone initiation and can look 
after others. 

‘“‘ Nganga is the doctor, but the doctor curing by means 
of the more or less secret remedies he employs. He is the 
man of medicine, wa-mori. It is his task to prepare, too, the 
miraculous plants which will confer invulnerability in war. 
As we see, nganga and mongoma are very closely related. 

“ Gobela is the exorcist, who expels the Zulu or Ndjao 
spirits. There are even two different categories of these, 
according to whether the north or the south is referred to. 

‘© Wa-bula is the bone-thrower, the diviner par excellence, 
the family counsellor, the interpreter of fate. 


“The chinusa is the personage who divines by visions or . 


by ecstasy. 

““ As for the word sorcerer, that must be reserved for the 
baloyi, those who bewitch, the magicians, if you prefer, those 
who go by night to place their charms, and kill by their 
witchcraft. These individuals have no connection with the 
preceding. 

“ Finally, the priest, that is, the muhahli, and this, in his 
own family, is what every father is. He may be only this, 
but it is also possible that he occasionally has other 
functions.” ! 

In this stage of development, if we persist in calling all 
these practices by the name of “‘ magic,” there would seem 
to be an official and public magic, as it were, a private and 
legitimate magic, and an occult and criminal practice of magic. 
It is evidently better not to include in one and the same term 
ideas which have become mutually exclusive. Among the 
Kafirs, for instance, “‘if an tsangoma (diviner) were saluted 
as a umtakati (sorcerer), it would be the most deadly insult 
that could be offered. It would be just the same as calling 
a European police agent a thief. To the Kafir mind, the 
diviner on the contrary is the protector of social order, and 
his task consists in discovering criminals and sorcerers and 

1 Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, pp. 467-8. 





PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 295 


putting justice on their track. Whilst the sorcerer exercises 
his art from motives of personal interest, to attain an end 
which is prohibited, the diviner must work in a legitimate 
way for the public good, as a kind of official, and for this 
reason he enjoys considerable importance among the Kafirs.”’ 7 
When a religion, properly so called, has been established, 
with forms of worship and organized clergy, there is additional 
reason for the strengthening of the contradistinction between 
religious ceremonies, either public or private, and magical 
operations which are more or less secret and malevolent. 
I do not propose to follow this differentiation further. It is 
sufficient to have shown that prelogical, mystic representations 
can but have corresponding methods and traditions which are 
equally mystic in their nature. The orientation of both is 
necessarily the same. Their correlation is the more manifest 
when observation is brought to bear upon the most primitive 
types, and therefore, to prove my case, I have selected facts 
drawn from communities of this kind. 

Nevertheless, beneath this contradistinction there is a 
certain relationship. Practices which, from the social point 
of view, have become very different, none the less imply 
collective representations of the same nature. That is they 
relate to a mentality which is prelogical and mystic, still 
recognizable under the modifications it may have undergone. 
For instance, the actually religious rites, the prayers and 
ceremonies by means of which the priests hope to soften the 
gods who are masters of the rainfall, imply collective repre- 
sentations of the same order as those which form the basis of 
the intichiuma ceremonies. The intermediate stages are to be 
observed among the Zuñis, for instance. The antagonism 
between the actually magical practices and the legitimate and 
religious practices in most aggregates which are already 
civilized to a certain extent, does not therefore signify that 
prelogical, mystic mentality is the source of the one and not 
of the other. On the contrary, we find it more or less unadul- 
terated at the basis of all these practices, and possibly it is 
this common origin which accounts for the variety and extent 
of the meaning given to the word ‘“‘ magic.” If by ‘ magic ” 


ia Aegidius Müller, ‘‘ Wahrsagerei bei den Kaffern,’’ Anthropos, p. 762 
1906). 


296 HOW NATIVES THINK 


we understand every process which supposes that mystic 
relations and occult forces are at work, there is scarcely any 
act, even of peoples who are comparatively advanced, which may 
not be of magic character to some extent atleast. In so far as 
the law of participation more or less governs the mentality, 
it also more or less determines the modality of its action. 
There would seem to be nothing less mystic than for the 
primitive to satisfy his hunger when food is within his reach. 
Nevertheless we see him, nearly everywhere, voluntarily 
abstaining from certain foods which are forbidden. In almost 
all the aggregates known to us at present, there are a great 
many taboos with respect to food. In particular, where 
totemic institutions prevail, on no account—save on certain 
definite occasions—would a man consent to feed upon his 
totem. On the other hand, partaking of a being is in a certain 
sense participating in it, communicating and identifying 
oneself with it: for this reason, therefore, there are certain 
foods which should be sought after, and others which should | 
be avoided. This is, as we know, the origin of a certain kind 
of anthropophagy. The heart, liver, fat, and brain of enemies 
killed in war are eaten so that their courage and their 
intelligence may be appropriated; just as, with us, tuber- 
culous subjects eat raw meat that they may be better 
nourished. Other foods are rejected for the opposite reason. 
‘ They ’’ (the Abipones) ‘all detest the thought of eating 
hens, eggs, sheep, fish, and tortoises, imagining that those 
tender kinds of food engender sloth and languor in their bodies 
and cowardice in their minds. On the other hand, they eagerly 
devour the flesh of the tiger, bull, stag, boar... having 
an idea that, from continually feeding on these animals, 
their strength, boldness and courage are increased.” 1—In 
the north-eastern provinces of India, “‘ the owl is the type of 
wisdom, and eating the eyeballs of an owl gives the power of 
seeing in the dark.’’2 In New Zealand, ‘“ a good orator was 
compared to the korimako, the sweetest singing bird of New 
Zealand ; to enable the young chief to become one, he was 
fed upon that bird, so that he might the better acquire its 
qualities.”’ 3 The Cherokees had the same idea. ‘‘ He who 


t Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, i. p. 258. 
2 W. Crooke, Folklore of Northern India, i. p. 279. 
3 KR. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 353. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 207 


feeds on venison is swifter and more sagacious than the man 
who lives on the flesh of the clumsy bear or helpless dunghill 
fowls. . . . Formerly their great chieftains observed a con- 
stant rule in their diet. . . . A continuous adherence to the 
diet commonly used by a bear will finally give to the eater 
the bear nature, if not also the bear form and appearance. 
A certain term of white man’s food will give the Indian the 
white man’s nature, so that neither the remedies nor the spells 
of the Indian doctor will have any effect upon him.’”’! What 
is true of men and animals applies also to the gods. ‘The 
idol was very dirty and smeared with blood, but in his right 
side was a hole showing the natural white colour of the 
material, contrasting strangely with the dusky appearance of 
the rest of the figure. This hole owes its existence to the 
belief that the power of healing and the knowledge of 
mysterious things are acquired by eating a little of the god’s 
holy body.’ ? Facts of this kind are extremely common, 
and the reader will find many of them analysed in Robertson 
Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites.”’ 

It is the same with clothing as with food: the mystic 
element plays an important part, and in certain cases pre- 
ponderates over utilitarian considerations. Many “ savage ” 
tribes, before coming into contact with white men, wore no 
garments of any kind, but there were none among whom 
there were no adornments: feathers, beads, tattoo marks, 
painting, and the like. Now, as we know, these adornments 
are not mainly, nor solely, decorative. They have a mystic 
character, and possess magic power. The eagle’s feather 
assures him who wears it the strength, piercing sight and 
wisdom of the bird, and it is the same with other things. 
Conversely, if the attention of investigators had been directed 
to this point, they would doubtless have noted taboos relating 
_ to clothing as to food: we have already seen the case of the 
Malay chief who refused to carry a deerskin in his canoe, lest 
the timidity of the deer should be communicated to his young 
son. As a general rule, just as one participates in the quali- 
ties of that which he eats, so does one secure the qualities of 
that which he wears. Here is one example among many. 


: Adair, quoted by Mooney, ‘‘ Myths of the Cherokee,” E. B. Rept., xix. 
P. 472. 
2 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, ii. p. 170. 


298 HOW NATIVES THINK 


‘ One morning I shot a hyena in my yard. The chief sent 
one of his executioners to cut off its nose and the tip of its tail, 
and to extract a little bit of brain from the skull. The man 
informed me that those parts are very serviceable to elephant- 
_hunters, as securing for them the cunning, tact, and power to 
become invisible which the hyena is supposed to possess. I 
suppose that the brain would represent the cunning, the nose 
the tact, and the tip of the tail the vanishing quality.” ! 

Here we have that ‘“‘ sympathetic magic ” so fully described 
by Tylor, Frazer, and their disciples among the English 
school of anthropology. May I be allowed to refer readers 
to their works for facts such as these, to be met with in 
hundreds ? In them we see how various qualities are com- 
municated by contact and transference, how the whole is 
attained by means of a part, such as holding a man in one’s 
power when one has his hair, his nail-parings, saliva, water, 
name, or likeness, and finally how to produce like by means. 
of like (to incite the rain to fall by sprinkling water, etc.). 
What matters here is to show that these practices of a 
‘““sympathetic magic,” which are often akin to those which 
I have analysed, refer equally to the collective representations 
of the primitive mind and to the law of participation which 
governs them. In this sphere, too, behaviour is oriented 
in the same direction as the mental activity. Prelogical, 
mystic mentality, perceiving everywhere secret relations, 
actions and reactions which are external and at the same 
time intimate, between all entities, in short, finding partici- 
pations everywhere, can only hope to influence nature by 
establishing, or by rupturing, similar participations. Among 
the Baganda, for instance, “a sterile wife is generally sent 
away because she prevents her husband’s garden from bearing 
fruit . . . on the contrary, the garden of a prolific woman 
bears plentifully.2 Here the husband of a sterile wife is 
merely combating a troublesome participation ; in another 
case, one will try to induce favourable ones. Thus, in Japan, 
‘trees must be grafted only by young men, because of the 
special need of vital energy in the graft.” 3 


t Arnot, quoted by Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 204. 

3 J. Roscoe, ‘“‘ Manners and Customs of the Baganda,”’ J.A.J., xxxii. pp. 
38, 56. 

3 Chamberlain, Things Japanese, p. 440. 


PRIMITIVES’ PRACTICES 299 


Contact, also, in certain definite cases, establishes partici- 
pation. Here is a very clear instance. In Loango, “the 
ba nganga teach that a new fetish sucks in strength, as it were, 
from contact with other fetishes of proved vigour, next which 
it is placed—provided only, that it is destined to serve the 
same end as theirs. For this reason they agree, if the price 
offered be satisfactory, to put new and untried charms into 
their collection of effective and well-tested magical objects, 
and to leave them there for weeks or months. So too, if a 
fetish has become somewhat doubtful and feeble, its strength 
is renewed by this process. It is a method of restoring its 
vigour. If a fetish proves excellent, a duplicate is made, 
and left for a long time in contact with the first. The 
duplicate is called the child of the original fetish.”’ ! 

Finally, it is participation again, that the well-known 
practices by whose means “‘sympathetic magic” seeks to 
further the principle of “like acting upon like” aim at 
establishing. If we study them in communities which are 
already fairly developed, we shall perhaps be inclined to regard 
as adequate the interpretation which refers them to the 
association of ideas and the confusion of the objective and 
the subjective. In China, for example, innumerable practices 
of this kind may be noted, and sometimes they seem to be 
like the translating of a punning joke into action. Thus, 
at a certain period in the funeral ceremonies, ‘‘ the son of the 
deceased . . . in concert with most of the attending kinsmen, 
hastens to swallow a few mouthfuls of cooked vermicelli, 
wisely inferring that the long threads of this food must greatly 
counteract, nay totally neutralize the life-shortening influences 
which the grave-clothes may have exercised over his person.” 2 
It seems as if here we have one of those cases of association 
of ideas which the somewhat abstract subtlety of the Chinese 
affects: the underlying idea, however, is that of rupturing 
a dreaded participation. But here is a circumstance reported 
from South India, the interpretation of which is yet more 
definite. ‘“‘ Carved wooden figurines, male and female, repre- 
sented in a state of nudity, are manufactured at Tirupati 
and sold to Hindus. Those who are childless perform on 


1 Dr. Pechuél-Loesche, op. cit., ill. 2, pp. 366, 380. 
2 De Groot, The Religious System of China, i. pp. 68, 208. 


300 HOW NATIVES THINK 


them the ear-boring ceremony, in the belief that, as the result 
thereof, issue will be born to them. If there be grown-up 
boys and girls in a family who remain unmarried, the parents 
celebrate the marriage ceremony between a pair of dolls, 
in the hope that the marriage of their children will speedily 
follow. They dress up the dolls in clothes and jewellery, 
and go through the ceremonial of a real marriage. Some 
there are who have spent as much money on a doll’s wedding 
as on a wedding in real life.’”’! This expenditure, sometimes 
very considerable, attests the faith of the Hindus in the 
efficacy of the practice. 

Is it sufficiently accounted for by an appeal to association 
by similarity ; is it enough to say that they imagine like will 
produce like? It is a “probable” explanation, but it is 
difficult to maintain when we know that with primitive peoples 
practices like these proceed, not from an association of ideas 
in the individual, but from the participations imagined 
and felt in the group ideas. The Hindu who has a doll’s 
wedding is. acting just like the Redskin who dances “‘ to make 
the buffaloes come,” and the rain-maker who sprinkles his 
neighbours. It is a wholly mystic dramatization, designed to 
secure for the actors an equally mystic power over the person 
or the action imitated, creating between them and him a 
bond which is doubtless unintelligible to logical thought, 
but quite consistent with the law of participation which 
governs the collective representations of the prelogical 
primitive mind. Where prelogical mentality is purest, in 
aggregates of the most primitive type, the customs reflect 
it most clearly. We have noted this in the Australian 
aborigines and in certain groups in North and South America. 
In the more advanced types modality of action becomes more 
complicated, and a variety of divergent motives determines 
it. In nearly every case, however, when we probe this 
modality to its lowest depths, we discover traces which 
bear witness to the predominance formerly exercised by 
the law of participation. We shall find as many proofs of 
this as we can desire in the great Eastern civilizations, or 
even nearer home, in the folklore of European nations. 


1 Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, p. 347. 


CHAPTER VIII 


INSTITUTIONS IN WHICH COLLECTIVE REPRE- 
SENTATIONS GOVERNED BY THE LAW OF 
PARTICIPATION ARE INVOLVED (III) 


THERE are certain practices which I have reserved for con- 
sideration by themselves, as much on account of the important 
place they occupy in the life of primitives as of the light they 
throw upon their mentality. These are the practices relating 
to the dead, or rather, to the connection between the living 
and the dead, They are found everywhere: there is hardly 
any social group, of whatever type it may be, in which observers 
have not noted customs, taboos, rites which are obligatory at 
the moment of death, and for a shorter or longer period 
afterwards. 


i 


Everybody knows how, from time immemorial, considera- 
tion for the dead has imposed a burden on the living, among 
the Chinese.t In Canada, “if a fire should break out in a 
village where there are any dead bodies, they will be the first 
to be placed in safety. The people will despoil themselves of 
their most precious possessions to adorn the dead ; from time 
to time they open their tombs to change their garments, and 
they deprive themselves of food that they may carry it to 
their graves and to the places where they imagine their souls 
to be wandering. . . . In the grave they are careful to cover 
their bodies in such a way that no soil will touch them; the 
corpse is, as it were, in a little cell lined with skins, much 
richer and more ornate than a hut.”’ 2 

From the primitives’ point of view we can easily under- 

1 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. p. 658 et passim. 


2 Charlevoix, Journal d’un Voyage dans l'Amérique Septentrionale, iii. 
pp. 372 et seq. 


302 HOW NATIVES THINK 


stand that practices of this kind would be universal. To 
them, there is no insuperable barrier separating the dead from 
the living. On the contrary, they are constantly in touch with 
them. They can do them good or harm, and they can also be 
well or badly treated by them. To the primitive there is 
nothing stranger in communicating with the dead than in 
being connected with “‘spirits,’ or with any occult force 
whose influence he feels, or which he flatters himself he is 
subduing. 

Miss Kingsley relates that she once heard a negro talking - 
aloud, as if conversing with an interlocutor unseen by her. 
Upon inquiry she found that the negro was talking to his dead 
mother who, according to him, was present. To the primitive 
the reality of the objects he perceives does not in the least 
depend upon his being able to verify this reality by what we 
call experience ; indeed, as a rule, it is the intangible and 
invisible that is most real in his eyes. Moreover, the dead do 
not remain without revealing their presence even to the senses. 
To say nothing of the dreams in which they appear (and which 
are, as we know, perceptions which are matter of privilege and 
solicitation), the dead appear to sight as spectres and ghosts, 
and to hearing also. Sometimes they afford the living 
indescribable but very vivid sensations of a contact which has 
nothing material about it. Occasionally they are heard in the 
wind. ‘It cannot be seen; it is like the wind; in fact, the 
gentle rustling of the plantain leaves is said to be caused by 
the ghosts, and a whirlwind which carries up dust, leaves and 
straws is said to be the ghosts at play.” 1 It is the same in 
Brazil; ‘the Ges thought that the murmuring of the wind 
betrayed the presence of the dead.’’? In short, without 
insisting on well-known facts, the primitive lives with his dead 
as he does with the living who surround him. They are 
members, and very important members, of a society with 
manifold participations, a social symbiosis in which the collec- 
tive representations of his group give him his place. 

Hence we derive one of the most distinct differences dis- 
cernible between the mentality of primitives and logical 
thinking. Assuming that the latter develops gradually (a 


t J. Roscoe, ‘ Manners and Customs of the Baganda,”’ J.A.J., xxxii. p. 73. 
2 Von Martius, Beitrage zur Ethnographie Stid-Amertka’s, 1. p. 291. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 303 


hypothesis which we shall examine later), its ideas relating to 
the external world have finally become organized in “‘ nature,”’ 
i.e. In an order which is fixed and immutable, subordinated to 
laws which the subject may be aware of, but which appear to 
be wholly independent of him. Ideas with regard to the dead 
have not provided any such. They have only constituted that 
nebulous ensemble which we significantly call “the other 
world.” To the primitive mind, on the contrary, the other 
world and this one make one and the same reality only, a 
reality both imagined, felt and lived. 

Even to such a mind, however, ideas relating to the dead, 
and the customs connected with them, are distinguished by a 
more markedly prelogical character. However mystic other 
collective representations relating to data furnished by the 
senses may be, however mystic the customs pertaining to 
them, (such as hunting, fishing, warfare, illness, divination, 
- and so on) it is still necessary, if the desired end is to be 
attained,—the enemy conquered, the game brought down, 
etc.—that in some essential points the representations should 
coincide with objective reality, and the customs, at a given 
moment, be actually adapted to effect that end. Thus a 
minimum of order, objectivity and coherence is guaranteed. 
But in the representations and the customs relating to the 
dead, this external standard is not in force. The indifference 
to the law of contradiction which is peculiar to primitive 
mentality, will accordingly be manifested without let or 
hindrance. In this domain, therefore, we shall find practices 
which most strikingly attest the prelogical nature of this 
mentality. 

The law of participation governs in despotic fashion the 
collective representations upon which these practices depend ; 
and permits of the most flagrant contradictions in these. We 
are already aware that, to minds like this, there is nothing 
exactly corresponding with that which we term soul or per- 
sonality. They regard a soul as both one and multiple, and 
believe that it can be present in two places at the same time, 
etc. In their customs, therefore, we must be prepared to find 
what we, from the logical point of view, regard as inextricable 
confusion. Our efforts must be directed, not to dispersing 
this confusion by establishing a logical order in the output of 


304 HOW NATIVES THINK 


a mystic mentality which cares nothing about it, but to show- 
ing how it is that such confusion is the natural result of the 
law of participation which governs the primitive mind. 

First of all, then, generally speaking, the primitive finds no 
difficulty in imagining the dead as sometimes constituting a 
community in the other world quite distinct from living 
communities, and again, as intervening on all occasions in the 
life of those here. For instance, among the natives of Torres 
Straits, “soon after a man dies, his mari goes to Kibu, where on 
his arrival the mari of a previously deceased friend takes the 
newcomer and hides him. At the first night of a new moon 
the mart is introduced by his friend to all the other markaz, 
each of whom takes stone-headed clubs and hits him on the 
head and then he is a true markai. They then teach the new 
markat how they spear fish, and how to do whatever they 
themselves do. . . . There was a general agreement that mari 
or markat behaved in every way as do men, and they could 
marry mortals.’’! In China, where the ideas and practices 
relating to the dead have been preserved from the very earliest 
times, we find the same contradictions. On the one hand, 
there is a world of spectres which imitates the world of men. 
Its society is organized in the same way, and its clan life 
continues. Each one maintains the rank that he had pre- 
viously held in life, and he continues to practise ancestor- 
worship with the same rites as before. The dead have their 
armies and their fights, their burial places and their funeral 
ceremonies. Men are as formidable to spectres as spectres 
are to men ; the bad influence they exert is reciprocal, and on 
both sides this is exorcized by means of sacrifices. De Groot 
relates a very significant legend of men penetrating into the 
land of spectres, their presence there causing terror. Sacrifices 
are offered to them and they are conducted to the frontier with 
infinite precautions.3 

On the other hand, however, according to the same author, 
“it is an inveterate conviction of the Chinese people, a doctrine, 
an axiom, that spirits exist, keeping up with the living a most 
lively intercourse, as intimate almost as that among men. 

1 The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, v. p. 357. 


> J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. pp. 48, 924. 
3 Ibid; ii. pp. 8002-71. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 305 


There exists, in fact, a line of separation between the dead and 
the living, but it is a very faint line, scarcely discernible. In 
every respect their intercourse bears an active character. It 
brings blessing, and evil as well, the spirits thus ruling 
effectually man’s fate.’’! These expressions show that the 
dead are believed to be alive in their graves. “‘ Throughout 
the whole range of Chinese literature, coffins with a corpse 
inside are designated ‘ animated encoffined corpses’ or ‘ ani- 
mated coffins.’’’+ A young girl, widowed as a bride, “‘ when 
she has acquired the consent of her own parents and those of 
her deceased bridegroom may renounce conjugal life for ever. 
She is as a rule allowed to settle for good in the mortuary 
house, and is then formally united with the dead in marriage.”’ 3 
We are told that “in ancient China there existed the curious 
custom of placing deceased females in the tombs of lads who 
died before they were married.” 4 Public opinion inclines so 
favourably to the sacrifice of wives who follow their husbands 
to the tomb, and the act reflects so much honour on the 
families that widows often desire it, or at least resign them- 
selves to it, or they may even be constrained to it by their 
family circle. 

The negroes of West Africa hold that when a man dies he 
only gets rid of his corporeal body and changes his abode, for 
everything else remains as before.s In North America, among 
the Sioux, as Dorsey tells us, “‘the dead in all respects 
resemble the living. . . . They are not always visible to the 
living. They are sometimes heard but not seen, though in the 
lodge with a mortal. Occasionally they become materialized, 
taking living husbands or wives, eating, drinking, and smok- 
ing, just as if they were ordinary human beings.” 6—" A 
young Dakota dies just before marrying a girl whom he loved. 
The girl mourned his death. . . . The ghost returned and took 
her for his wife. Whenever the tribe camped for the night, 
the ghost’s wife pitched her tent at some distance from the 
others, and when the people removed their camp, the woman 
and her husband kept some distance behind the main body. 
The ghost always told the woman what to do; and he brought 


1 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, ii. p. 464. 
2 [bid., i. p. 348. 3 Ibid., i. p. 763. 4 Ibid., pp. 802 et seq. 
5 A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, p. 106. 
6 Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,” Æ. B. Rept., xi. p. 485. 
20 


306 HOW NATIVES THINK 


her game regularly. . . . The people could neither see nor hear 
the ghost, but they heard his wife address him. He always 
sent word to the tribe when there was to be a high wind or 
heavy rain.’ An Iroquois legend tells of a dead man who 
talks to his daughter and gives her advice.? Facts of this 
kind are, as we know, very numerous. 

If, therefore, we are to interpret aright the primitives’ 
conceptions and customs with regard to their dead, it will be 
necessary to rid ourselves, as far as we can, of the ordinary 
concepts of ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘ death,” just as it is wise not to make 
use of the concept “‘soul.’’ It is impossible for us to define 
these terms save by elements that are physiological, objective, 
and experimental, whilst the ideas which correspond with 
them among primitives are mystic in their essence, and to such 
an extent that they ignore a dilemma which logical thought 
regards as insurmountable. To us, a human being is either 
alive or dead: there is no middle course, whereas to the 
prelogical mind he is alive in a certain way, even though he be 
dead. While participating in the life of human beings, he at 
the same time makes one of the company of the dead. To put 
it more precisely, he is living, or dead, to the extent in which 
such and such a participation exists or does not exist, for 
him. The way in which the living conduct themselves with 
regard to him depends entirely upon whether these participa- 
tions continue or have been ruptured or are about to be 
ruptured. 

We are thus faced by collective representations and customs 
which are of extreme complexity. We cannot study their 
almost infinite detail here, for even in the same country they 
vary in the different tribes. ‘ No particular description of 
burial ceremonies can bé held applicable to all tribes, or even 
to eny one tribe, if the age, character, or position of the 
deceased was such as to procure for him more than ordinary 
respect.’ 3 Just because the dead continue to live, each one 
of them is treated according to his rank, sex, and age,— 
circumstances which observers, when describing these cere- 
monies, very often neglect to specify. Moreover, the customs 


I Dorsey, “ Siouan Cults,’ E. B. Rept., xi. p. 490. 
2 Hewitt, ‘ Iroquoian Cosmoiogy,” Æ. B. Rept., xxi. pp. 147 et seq. 
3 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, i. p. 114. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 307 


relating to death and the dead are possibly the most persistent 
of all. Consequently, whilst the social milieu, institutions, 
creeds are modified, these customs change but slowly. They 
remain in use even when their significance has gradually 
become obscured and been lost. Interpreted in accordance 
with new ideas and sentiments,—that is, in a contrary sense 
very frequently—it may happen that they are carried out in 
such a way as to become self-contradictory in the portion 
retained. The funeral rites in most social aggregates, if not 
in all, thus present an irregular stratification in which customs 
which date back to remote antiquity and relate to a very 
primitive type of mentality are blended with practices depend- 
ing upon more recent conceptions, incompatible with such a 
mentality. Finally, in a great many aggregates the funeral 
rites and ceremonies vary once more according to the nature 
and cause of the decease, and whether the individual has 
departed this life by a ‘‘ good ” or ‘‘ bad ”’ death. | 

It is the province of ethnography to give the most detailed 
and circumstantial description possible of these ceremonies 
and their very varied nature. It will suffice here to show that 
it is the mystic and prelogical mentality which inspires them ; 
that to such a mentality the different degrees of life and death 
consist in participations or the lack of them ; and finally, that 
the same man does not pass through two stages of being only, 
one when he is alive, and the other when he is dead, but goes 
through a series of states and a cycle of phases in which he 
participates more or less in what we call life and death. The 
plan I am about to sketch for you can only be a rough pro- 
visional one, and I regard it as applicable (to the extent in 
which it may be accepted) to communities of the most primi- 


tive type only,—communities in which totemistic organization — 


is still recognizable, even if not in its full vigour—such aggre- 
gates as the Australian aborigines, for instance. I warn you 
also that it is impossible to imagine man as an integral whole 
going through all the phases of this schematic cycle in succes- 
sion. On the contrary, that which characterizes certain of 
these phases is that participations have no part in them, and 
without these, according to our logical thought, there can be 
no human being. But it is the nature of prelogical mentality 
to move freely among these participations or these isolations, 


308 pe HOW NATIVES THINK 


whilst logical thought feels disconcerted and lost there, for lack 
of ability to operate upon concepts that are clearly defined 
and conformable with its own laws. 

With such exceptions, our sketch, starting from the state 
of the adult man who has undergone the initiation ceremonies 
and has married within his social group, would differentiate 
the following stages : 

(x) Death, and the longer or shorter period which elapses 
between the last breath and the funeral ceremonies ; 

(2) The period which intervenes between the funeral cere- 
monies and the end of the days of mourning ; i.e. the rite which 
definitely ruptures the relations between the dead man and 
those who were closely associated with him in the social group; 

(3) The period, indefinite in its duration, but yet finite, in 
which the dead is awaiting his reincarnation ; 

(4) Birth, and the longer or shorter time which elapses 
between the birth and the giving of the name ; 

(5) The period which intervenes between the naming and 
the initiation ; 

(6) The life of an adult initiate man, which ends with 
death, when the cycle begins once more. 

In our language, then, we should say that death, like 
birth, is accomplished in stages. Death begins with the first 
period, and is not complete until after the ceremony which 
ends the second. Birth, too, begins with the actual confine- 
ment, and man is not complete until after the initiation cere- 
monies. Here again our mental habits and our language 
oblige us to divide into clearly distinct periods that which to 
prelogical mentality is represented in the form of multiple 
participations, either beginning or ceasing to be co-existent. 


II 


According to primitive ideas, death always implies a 
mystic cause, and nearly always, a notion of violence. It is 
an abrupt rupture of the ties binding an individual to the 
social group. New relations, accordingly, are established 
between this group and himself. Far from being henceforth a 
negligible quantity, he who has just died is an object of pity, 
fear, respect, and a number of varied and complex feelings. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 309 
The funeral rites reveal group ideas inseparably connected 
with these feelings. 

There are communities in which these rites begin even 
before the patient has breathed his last, so great is the primi- 
tives’ haste to remove the dead from the living. Among the 
Abipones, for instance, ‘if the respiration of the dying man be 
not heard at a distance .. . and if his breath stop even for a 
moment, they proclaim . . . that he has given up the ghost . .. 
The first business of the bystanders is to pull out the heart and 
the tongue of the deceased . . . and give them to a dog to 
devour, that the author of his death may soon die also. The 
corpse, while yet warm, is clothed according to the fashion of 
his country, wrapped in a hide . . . and conveyed on ready 
horses to the grave. . . . I strongly suspect that the heart is 
sometimes cut out when they are half alive.” 1 

Among the Cape Flattery Indians, “‘ I have known several 
cases where considering the circumstances, there is scarcely 
any doubt but that people have been buried during a swoon, 
or when in a comatose state merely. I have often told them 
how foolish it was to bury these people without having tried to 
revive them; but I have never been able to persuade them to 
wait a single instant after they believe that the last breath 
has been drawn. . . . A woman had just lost her husband. 
She was remarkably robust and in good health. I saw her 
seated beside the brook bemoaning the death of her husband, 
and I went on to the village a quarter of a mile away, where I 
had some sick people to see. . . . Suddenly I heard women’s 
lamentations announcing a death. I hastened to return and 
found that it was the woman I had seen a few moments 
before. . . . Before I reached her hut she was wrapped in her 
grave-clothes and squeezed into a box, ready to be buried. Her 
relatives would not listen to a single word, nor allow me to do 
anything whatever.” 2 

“ Frequently,” said a Jesuit missionary, speaking of the 
Canadian Indians, ‘‘ they were buried according to their own 
rites before they had actually expired.” 3 

Von den Steinen testifies to the same precipitancy among 


1 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, ii. pp. 266-8. 
2 Swan, The Indians of Cape Flattery, pp. 84-5. 
3 Relations des Jésuites, p. 260 (1636). 


310 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the Bororos.t It is the same thing with the Bakwains of 
South Africa. ‘‘ Scarcely is the breath out of the body,” says 
Livingstone, ‘“‘ when the unfortunate patient is hurried away 
to be buried. An ant-eater’s hole is often selected, in order 
to save the trouble of digging a grave. On two occasions 
while I was there this hasty burial was followed by the return 
home of the men, who had been buried alive, to their 
affrighted relatives.’”’2 ‘In a general way, in the many 
communities where they hold that a living man has several 
souls, it is enough that one of them should depart (provided 
that this departure is a definite one) for him to be considered 
dead: it matters little that the soul of his body be there still, 
if that which makes his personality has disappeared without 
intention of returning. We found this belief prevalent among 
the North American Indians. It exists elsewhere also, among 
the Dravidian tribes of Bengal. When the sick man is in his 
last agony, barely conscious, with the death-rattle in his 
throat, they say: ‘ His body is still moving, but his soul (roa) . 
has already departed.’ ”’ 3 

Most frequently, however, the funeral rites and the inter- 
ment do not take place immediately, precisely because they do 
not know whether death is a definite fact, or whether the soul 
(I use this term, in default of a better,) will return to the body 
as it does after dreams, fainting-fits, etc. They accordingly 
wait a while, making use of all the means likely to bring back 
the departed. Hence arises that widely spread custom of 
calling aloud on the dead, imploring and beseeching him not 
to leave those who love him. “The Caribs lament loudly, 
their wailings being interspersed with . . . questions to the 
dead as to why he preferred to leave this world, having every- 
thing to make life comfortable. They place the corpse on a 
little seat in a ditch or grave four or five feet deep, and for ten 
days they bring food, requesting the corpse to eat. Finally, 
being convinced that the dead will neither eat nor return to 
life, they . . . fill up the grave.’’4 So, too, do the natives of 


Unter den Naturvôlkern Zeniralbräsiliens, pp. 350, 397. 

2 Livingstone, Missionary Travels, p. 129. 

3 “‘ Sagen, Sitten und Gebrauche der Munda Kolhs in Chota Nagpore,”’ 
Zeitschrift fr Ethnologie, p. 371 (1871). 

4 Bruhier, in Yarrow’s “‘ Mortuary Customs of the North American 
Indians,” E. B. Rept., i. p. 166. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 311 


the west coast of Africa appeal aloud to the dead, begging him 
not to leave them, except in the case of his having been deaf 
when alive (for then they believe the ghost or soul to be deaf 
also). ‘“‘ Generally speaking, it is only when the corpse begins 
to become corrupt, and the relatives thereby become certain 
that the soul does not intend to return, that it is buried.’’? 
Finally, in China, the custom of ‘‘calling back the dead ”’ has 
existed from the very earliest times, and is still tenaciously 
maintained to-day.? | | 

Among the tribes of Eastern Sumatra, ‘‘ when a man dies, 


the corpse remains a day and a night in the house....A 
grave is dug; and the body, with a bottle of water and a 
fowl . . . is placed therein and the grave closed. (If the 


corpse be that of a woman, her ornaments are included.) 
Then bonfires are lighted, and the family live and sleep near 
the tomb for a period of three days ; (this is extended to seven 
in the case of a chief). This time is necessary, they believe, 
for the dead to be really dead, and until that period has 
elapsed they must keep him company.”’ 3 

At this moment, then, the dead man’s: participation in his 
social group is suspended rather than actually ruptured. 
They believe, or they wish to believe, that nothing is irre- 
parable, and that former conditions may be re-established. If 
the soul does not return and the dead awake, however, other 
ideas supervene, and with them other feelings are aroused. 
Of the Australian aborigines we are told that they believe that 
the spirit of a man, especially if he died a violent death, 
is extremely miserable and malevolent ; in his anger he is 
always ready to become exasperated on the slightest pretext, 
and to vent his spite on the living. . . . They seem to think, 
too, that the deceased, for a certain number of days after his 
death, has not received his spiritual body, which is slow in 
forming, and that during this period of transition he is, like a 
child, particularly petulant and revengeful.4 The dead man 
finds himself in a state that is painful for himself and 
dangerous for others, who henceforward shun contact with‘ 

1 A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, pp. 106-8. | 

2 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. p. 253. 

3 Moskowski, Siämme von Ost Sumatra, p. 644. 


4 J. Fraser, “ Some Remarks on the Australian Languages,” Journal of 
the Royal Society of New South Wales, pp. 235 (1890). 


312 HOW NATIVES THINK 


him. Since he no longer is an integral part of the group like 
others, he must get away from them. 

This feeling is often expressed in the most naive and vivid 
fashion. ‘‘ When a man is dying his friends take food to him, 
and say: ‘Be good; if you leave us, go altogether.’’’* As for 
the Igorots of the Philippines, “ during the first days the old 
women and again the old men sang at different times the 
following song: ‘ Now you are dead ... We have given you 
all things necessary, and have made good preparation for the 
burial. Do not come to call away any of your relatives or 
friends.’ ”’ 2—Again, in West Africa, we find from Nassau's 
account that the feelings of survivors with respect to the dead 
are ‘‘ very mixed. The outcry of affection, pleading with the 
dead to return to life is sincere, the survivor desiring the 
return to life to be complete; but almost simultaneous with 
that cry comes the fear that the dead may indeed return, not 
as the accustomed, embodied spirit, helpful and companion- 
able, but as a disembodied spirit, invisible, estranged, perhaps’ 
inimical.’’3 Miss Kingsley has noted the same fear, and it 
was explained to her that it was due not to malevolence but 
to loneliness; the dead did not wish to hurt the members of 
his own family, particularly the children, but he desired to 
have their company, and ‘“ this desire for companionship is of 
course immensely greater, and therefore more dangerous, in 
the spirit that is not definitely settled in the society of spirit- 
dom.’ 4 This it is which makes the first few days after death 
peculiarly critical. Not only is the relation of the dead with 
his own group only just ruptured, but his connection with the 
spirit-group is not yet established. 

North American natives manifest the same ideas and 
sentiments. To the Tarahumares, ‘‘death means only ... 
a change of form. ... They are afraid of the dead and 
think that they want to harm the survivors. This fear is 
caused by the supposition that the dead are lonely and long 
for the company of their relatives. The dead also make people 
ill, that they too may die and join the departed. . . . When 
a person dies his eyes are closed, his hands crossed over his 


t Basil Thomson, ‘‘ The Natives of Savage Island,” 7.4.1. xxxi., p. 139. 
2 Jenks, The Bontoc Igorot, p. 75 (Manila, 1905). 

3 Fetichism in West Africa, p. 223. 

4 West African Studies, p. 113. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 313 


breast, and . . . the relatives talk to him one by one, and 
bid him goodbye. The weeping widow tells her husband that, 
now that he has gone and does not want to stay with her any 
longer, he must not come back to frighten her or his sons or 
daughters or anyone else. She implores him not to call any 
of them off, nor do any mischief, but to leave them all alone. 
A mother says to her dead infant: ‘Now go away! Don’t 
come back any more, now that you are dead!’ And the father 
says to the child: ‘Don’t come back to ask me to hold your 
hand, or to do things for you. I shall not know you any 
more.’ ’’! 

These fears are so much the more vivid because during 
the early days one imagines the dead, that is, his soul or 
spirit, living in the hut or cabin in which he died, in any 
case not far away from his corpse, or else roaming about 
the neighbourhood, especially during the night. This belief 
is almost universal; even were it not implied in the 
group ideas a psychic process would arouse it in indi- 
viduals. Do not we ourselves, when death has robbed 
us of one of our dear ones, at first expect to see him 
returning home at his wonted hour and coming out of his 
room to take his place at table? With primitives, however, 
there is something beyond these poignant recollecticns which 
amount almost to hallucination: it is the visible presence of 
the body which, in their collective representations, brings in 
its train the invisible presence of the soul. ‘‘ After death, the 
soul remains for some time in the vicinity of the corpse before 
beginning its journey to the bura kure.”2 Hence it follows 
that in disposing of the body the fate of the soul can be settled 
at the same time. The dead man is assigned to the resting- 
place henceforth to be his, and the living are free from the 
terror caused by his presence during the intermediate period. 

Thus, whatever may be the form of these funeral cere- 
monies, in whatever fashion the corpse is disposed of—whether 
by interment, cremation, placing on a platform or in a tree, 
etc.—the essential characteristic of such practices is mystical, 
or, if you prefer it, magical, like the rites we have already 
studied. Just as the essential feature of the chase is con- 


1 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, i. pp. 380-2. 
2 Hagen, Unter den Papua’s, p. 266. 


314 HOW NATIVES THINK 


tained in rites which force the prey to appear, which paralyse 
the animal’s flight, make him blind, etc. ; just as the essential 
part of healing consists of practices designed to reveal the 
malevolent cause of the malady and give the medicine-man 
power to exorcise it; so too the essential features of the 
funeral rites which take place in the first days after death are 
the practices which definitely divide the dead from the com- 
pany of the living. They prevent him from mingling with 
them henceforward, and bring about his admission to the 
society of which he will hereafter form a part. Not that all 
relations between the living and the dead are broken off; we 
shall shortly discover that such is not the case. Hence- 
forward, however, these relations are to be controlled. In 
return for the observance of the regulations made, the dead 
man, being pacified, will demand nothing more, and the 
survivors on their side have nothing more to fear from him. 

On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary that these 
ceremonies should take place. We know that the Athenian 
and Roman citizens used to think respecting this much as 
do the Chinese and most of the peoples actually known at the 
present time. On the west coast of Africa, for instance, 
‘ when a person dies abroad, the family try to obtain some- 
thing that appertained to him, such as pieces of his hair, or 
nail-cuttings, over which the funeral ceremonies are then 
performed ; for the general belief is that the ghost or soul 
lingers near the remains until these ceremonies are performed ; 
and either cannot or will not depart to Dead-land before them. 
Hence, to declare to a criminal that, after his execution, no 
funeral rites will be held over his body, is to him more terri- 
fying than death itself; for the latter merely transmits him 
to another sphere, where he continues his ordinary avocations, 
while the former opens to his imagination all kinds of ill- 
defined terrors.”’ 1 

Therefore without going into the extraordinarily varied 
details of the ritual which takes place from the moment the 
sufferer expires until the more or less distant day when the 
obsequies, properly so called, are carried out, and above all, 
without disputing the fact that by the way in which these are 
performed, various distinct ends are often desired ; (such, for 

1 A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, p. 159. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 315 


example, as avoiding contamination from the proximity of the 
corpse, helping the weakness of the deceased, who is not com- 
pletely in possession of his human body and has as yet not 
attained to his ghostly one, safeguarding the survivors from 
his violence, interrogating the dead to ascertain who killed 
him, and so on,) we may admit that the general tendency of 
these customs is to what-is mystical, and that they aim at 
determining, with or without his concurrence, the position of 
the dead man to his own satisfaction and the safety of the 
survivors. From a shaman who had been resuscitated, Boas 
received the following very interesting account relating to the 
experiences he had undergone in the few days immediately 
after his death. ‘‘ When I was dead, I did not feel any pain. 
I sat by my body, and saw how you prepared it for burial, and 
how you painted my face with our crest. . . . After four days 
I felt as though there was no day and no night.” (Thus, in 
the course of these four days, the deceased was by degrees 
removed from the ordinary conditions of life, which were still 
his immediately after his death; during this period, which 
extends from the moment of death until the celebration of the 
burial rites, everything that happens is calculated to weaken 
the connection between the deceased and his living state, and 
to prepare him for other relations.) ‘I saw you carrying 
away my body and felt compelled to accompany it, although 
I wished to stay in our house. I asked every one of you to 
give me some food, but you threw it into the fire, and then I 
felt satisfied. At last I thought, ‘I believe I am dead, for 
nobody hears me, and the burnt food satisfies me,’ and I 
resolved to go into the land of the souls.”’ 1 This shaman, like 
those to whom he is speaking, has no doubt that the soul 
wants to dwell among the living, and that it would have 
remained there, indeed, if the funeral ceremonies had not 
forced it to follow the corpse. | 

It may also happen that the soul of the dead does not 
retire to a distance immediately after the celebration of the 
obsequies. Among the Zuñis, for instance, although the 
interment takes place at once, the soul haunts the village for 
four days after death, and does not start on its long journey 


1 F. Boas, ‘ The North-west Tribes of Canada,” Reports of the British 
Association, p, 843 (1889). 


316 HOW NATIVES THINK 


until the morning of the fifth.t Conversely, we often read of 
practices designed to expel the spirit of the dead even before 
the obsequies. The Baidyas of South India believe that the 
ghost of a dead person haunts the house until the fifth day. 
‘* Before retiring to bed on the evening of this day, the inmates 
sprinkle the portico with ashes from the spot where the de- 
ceased breathed his last, and take great care to abstain from 
walking thereon, or approaching the sprinkled spot, lest the 
ghost should strike them. Early next morning they examine 
the ashes, to see if the marks of the cloven foot of the ghost 
are left thereon. If the marks are clear, it is a sign that the 
ghost has departed ; otherwise a magician is called in to drive 
it out.”’ 2—‘‘ Among the Tyans of Malabar, on the morning of 
the third day . . . the nearest relative brings into the room a 
steaming pot of savoury funeral rice. It is immediately 
removed, and the spirit, after three days’ fasting, is understood 
to greedily follow the odour of the tempting food. They at 
once close the door and shut out the spirit.’’3 Lastly, that 
we may not multiply facts that are similar, we are told that 
among the Iban or Dyaks of Sarawak, when night has come, 
the manang or medicine-man celebrates a ceremony that is 
called Baserara, i.e. separation. . . . They believe that this 
ceremony separates the soul of the dead from those of the 
living ; thus they cause him to forget the living, and deprive 
him of the power to return and carry away with him the souls 
of his relatives and friends.4 Have we not here as clear a 
symbol as possible of the rupture of the relation between the 
soul of the dead man and his social group? Nevertheless, 
these more or less ingenious artifices, and these infinitely 
varied magical practices by means of which the soul of the 
dead is expelled or excluded, by depriving him of the desire to 
return to the place he occupied when alive, would not be a 
sufficient guarantee if the funeral rites, properly so called, 
i.e. the ceremonious performance of the obsequies, did not 
settle the dead in the state henceforth to be his, at least 
for a time. 

1 Stevenson, The Zuñis, p. 307. 

2 Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, p. 307. 

3 Ibid., P. 218. 


4 Dunn, The Religious Rites and Customs of the Iban or Dyaks of 
Sarawak,” Anthropos, i. p. 170 (1906). 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 317 


III 


The period which elapses between the first funeral cere- 
monies and that which puts an end to the time of mourning 
varies considerably in length. It may be a few weeks, or a 
few months, or even longer. It sometimes happens, as Hertz 
has demonstrated, that the final ceremony tends to be confined 
to certain rites only, or even to be confounded with the first 
obsequies. With most primitive peoples, however, there is 
still a clear distinction. This period differs from the pre- 
ceding one in that the terror inspired’ by the dead man has 
subsided. No longer is he, a dread and unhappy spectre, to 
be felt prowling around, ready to inflict injuries upon the 
survivors, and drag them, too, to their death. The mystic 
force of the funeral ceremonies has severed, to some extent, 
his participation in the group of living beings. It has secured 
for him an assured position, and at the same time it has 
ensured peace to the survivors. Certain relations persist, 
however: the custom of not neglecting the dead, but of 
bringing him at regular intervals food and other offerings ; of 
conciliating him ; above all, of not irritating him ; —(a custom 
which is general everywhere,) all these prove that even yet the 
dead man retains some power over the living. On both sides 
there are duties to fulfil and rights to maintain, and though 
the dead man is outside the group of the living, he is not yet 
a complete stranger. 

In the Arunta tribe, for instance, ‘‘ within a very short 
time of death the body . . . is interred . . . in a round hole 
in the ground, the earth being piled directly on to the body, so 
as to make a low mound with a depression on one side. This 
is always made on the side which faces towards the direction 
of the dead man or woman’s camping ground in the Alcheringa, 
that is, the spot which he or she inhabited whilst in spirit 
form. The object of this is to allow of easy ingress and egress 
to the Ulthana or spirit which is supposed to spend part of the 
time until the final ceremony of mourning has been enacted in 
the grave, part watching over near relatives, and part in 
company of its Arumburinga, that is, its spiritual double. . . ."’? 


1 “ La Représentation Collective de la Mort,” Année Sociologique, X. Pp. 120, 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 497. 


318 HOW NATIVES THINK 


Even when the obsequies have taken place, the dead man 
enjoys perfect liberty to come and go, and he pays great 
attention to the conduct of his relatives with regard to him. 
In the Northern tribes, ‘‘ the spirit of the dead person, called 
ungwulan, hovers about the tree (where the body is placed), 
and at times visits the camp, watching, if it be that of a man, 
to see that the widows are mourning properly. . . . It is 
consulted as to the time when the final ceremony shall take 
place.” ! | | 

It is quite natural that during this period the needs of the 
dead shall be provided for. In New Guinea, according to 
Edelfelt’s evidence, for some time great care is taken of the 
grave; trees are planted there, and feasts given at regular 
intervals in honour of the dead,?—feasts in which he himself 
naturally takes part. So too, with the Bororos of Brazil. 
“The first interment takes place on the second or third day. 
. . . The corpse is buried in the forest near water ; after about 
two weeks there is no flesh remaining, and the final festival, of 
which the aim is to decorate and wrap up the skeleton, is then 
celebrated. In the interval relations are maintained with the 
dead during the day, and above all during the night, by means 
of funeral songs. After the second ceremony nobody troubles 
about the dead again.’’3 In California the Yokaia are accus- 
tomed “to feed the spirits of the dead, for the space of one 
year, by going daily to places which they were accustomed to 
frequent while living, where they sprinkle food upon the 
ground. A Yokaia mother who has lost her babe goes every 
day to some place where her little one played while alive, or 
to the spot where its body was buried, and milks her breasts 
into the air. . . . Like the Yokaia and the Konkau, the Senel 
believe it necessary to nourish the spirits of the departed for 
the space of a year.” 4 

This very rigid obligation is imposed for a limited time 
only. Whilst the dead man remains in the vicinity, and 
comes and goes as he will, whilst he exercises surveillance over 
the group of which he once formed part, he has a right to 
many things, and he demands that all that is his due shall be 


* The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 530. 

> Edelfelt, Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives, p. 20. 

3 K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvôlkern Zentralbräsiliens, pp. 390-6. 
+ Powers, Tribes of California, pp. 166, 167, 171. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 319 


rendered him. With the second ceremony all this is at an 
end. It is permissible to think that the chief, if not the only, 
object of this ceremony is definitely to break the bond which 
allows the dead person, despite all, to participate to some 
extent in the life of the social group. The second or, accord- 
ing to the circumstances, the final ceremony perfects the 
death and makes it complete. Henceforth the soul of the 
dead man has no personal influence upon his social group, at 
any rate for a period of indefinite duration in which it is 
awaiting reincarnation. Therefore, after a minute descrip- 
tion of the final ceremony, in which the most important rite is 
the breaking of a bone, Spencer and Gillen add : “ When once 
_ the ceremony of breaking the bone . . . has been performed, 
and the bone deposited in its last resting-place, the spirit of 
the dead person, which they describe as being about the size 
of a grain of sand, goes back to its camping-place in the Win- 
gara, and remains there in company with the spirit parts of 
other members of its totem until such time as it undergoes 
reincarnation.” In Hertz’s monograph, La Représentation 
Collective de la Mort, he has cited a great number of cases, 
principally taken from the peoples of the Malay Archipelago, 
in which we find that death takes place in two parts, and is 
only considered to be completed after the second of these. I 
shall confine myself to relating some similar facts noted among 
the social groups of American and African primitives. With 
the Sioux, ‘‘ when a son dies, the parents with a knife cut off 
some hair from the top of the head, just above the forehead, 
placing the hair in a deerskin cover... . (They bring it 
offerings at regular intervals.) . . . At a certain moment the 
bag is opened, and the hair or ghost is taken out and buried. 
From this time the parting with his parents is absolute. They 
think that, until the hair is buried, the deceased is really 
present with the household, and that when this burial takes 
place, he dies a second time.” ?—In British Columbia, “a 
year after the death of a person his relatives collected a large 
amount of food and clothes, and gave a new feast on the 
grave. This was the end of the mourning period, and thence- 
forth they tried to forget the deceased. At this feast his son 


1 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 542. 
2 Dorsey, ‘‘ Siouan Cults,” E. B. Rept., xi. pp. 487-8. 


320 HOW NATIVES THINK 


adopted his name,’’! This last is a significant trait, for the 
name of a person forms a part of his individuality. 

In Mexico the Tarahumares celebrate three successive 
feasts. At the first, which takes place less than a fortnight 
after the death, all the mourners, headed by the shaman, 
speak to the dead man, and he is entreated to leave the sur- 
vivors in peace. . . . The second is held six months later. . . . 
Three men and three women take food and drink to the tomb ; 
the relatives remain at home. The third is the final effort to 
get rid of the deceased, and the proceedings terminate with a 
race between the young men. “They all come back rejoicing, 
and show their satisfaction by throwing into the air their 
blankets, tunics, and hats, because now the dead is at last 
chased off. . . . According to the names which the Tara- 
humares apply to the three functions, the main idea of the 
first is to give food, of the second to replenish the first supply, 
of the third to give drink. Each generally lasts one day and 
one night, and begins at the hour at which the dead breathed 
his last. . . . There are three feasts for a man and four for a 
woman. She cannot run so fast, and it is harder therefore to 
chase her off. Not until the last function has been made, will 
a widower or widow marry again, being more afraid of the dead 
than are other relatives.’’ 2 

But these same Tarahumares, having once celebrated the 
final ceremony, know that they have nothing to fear, and act 
accordingly. “The Tarahumares,’’ says Lumholtz, ‘‘ had no 
great scruples about my removing the bodies of their dead, 
if the latter had died some years before and were supposed 
to have been properly dispatched from this world. One 
Tarahumare sold me the skeleton of his mother-in-law for one 
dollar.” 3 “The Huichols are not afraid of dead who passed — 
out of life long enough ago.” 4 Knowing that Lumholtz was 
in search of human skulls they readily brought him some. It 
is the same thing in Equatorial Africa. The negroes ‘‘ fear the 
spirits of the recently departed, and besides placing furniture, 
dress and food at their graves, return from time to time with 
other supplies of food. During the season appointed for 


1 F. Boas, “ The North-west Tribes of Canada, Reports of the British 
Assoctation, p. 643 (1890). 

2 C. Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, i. pp. 384-7. 

3 Ibid., p. 390. bids a> Dress. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 321 


mourning, the deceased is remembered and feared, but when 
once his memory grows dim, the negro ceases to believe in the 
prolonged existence of the departed spirit, . . . Ask a negro 
about the spirit of his brother who died yesterday, and he is 
full of terror ; ask him about the spirit of those who died long 
ago, and he will tell you carelessly: ‘It is done,’ that is to 
say, it has no existence.” ! 

In Ceylon, ‘‘ the Weddahs no longer betray any fear of the 
skeleton of a man who died long ago. We never had the least 
difficulty in collecting Weddah skeletons. The natives readily 
showed us the place where, according to the instructions of the 
English inspector, they had buried them. Whilst we were 
extracting the skeletons from the ground, they nearly always 
watched us with interest, betraying not the slightest emotion ; 
and if it were necessary to search in the dust for the little bones 
of the hands and feet, they were always ready to help us.” ? 

Hertz has clearly shown why the ceremony which closes 
the mourning period is divided from the early obsequies by an 
interval which varies in length, but which is, as a rule, fairly 
long. In order that the final ceremony may be celebrated and 
the dead be relegated to a sufficient distance to preclude him 
from any intention to return, as well as to enable him to join 
other spirits awaiting their reincarnation, he himself must be 
absolutely discarnate. The flesh must have entirely dis- 
appeared from his bones, and the process of decomposition 
have been accomplished. This stands out clearly in the many 
cases related by Hertz and also in the detailed description of 
the funeral ceremonies of the Australian aborigines furnished 
by Spencer and Gillen. The decomposing corpse is visited 
from time to time, and the spirit which haunts its vicinity is 
asked at what moment it considers the bones to be sufficiently 
bare for the final ceremony to take place. 

I find, too, a confirmation of Hertz’ theory in a belief which 
_ is very common among primitives, and which is still main- 
tained in China. Certain ghosts are particularly dangerous 
and malevolent ; they are homicidal, and the source of horror 
and affright when they appear. It is found, moreover, that 


Du Chaillu, Equatorial Africa, p. 330. 
2 P, and F. Sarasin, Ergebnisse naturwissenschaftlicher Pen auf 
Ca. iil. Pp. 494, 
21 


322 HOW NATIVES THINK 


when the graves are opened, in order that these terrible 
spectres may be “ laid,” they are seen not to have undergone 
decomposition at all. In Loango, “when, on opening the 
tomb, the corpse is found intact, his eyes open, .. . it is 
destroyed by burning.” —In East Africa, “a near relative of 
the deceased, wife, husband or sister, dreaming of the departed 
night after night, for some weeks after death, wakes up in 
terror, goes and looks out of the hut, and finds the ghost of the 
deceased sitting near the door of the hut ; or it often happens 
that the ghost is seen sitting on the children’s playing-ground 
close to the village where the deceased was wont to play when 
a child. The ghosts are always much bigger than life-size. . . 
Then the grave is opened by one of the near relatives of the 
deceased, generally a brother, and the corpse is invariably 
found to be quite undecomposed and white. Itis then taken up 
and burnt, and the ashes carefully re-interred. This procedure 
lays the ghost.’’2 De Groot tells of many similar cases.3 

Thus the dead man whose body does not decay is peculiarly 
to be dreaded. He is abnormal, because he cannot proceed to 
that complete death which will definitely separate him from 
the living. He haunts and persecutes them by reason of his 
inability to become discarnate, and pass gradually from the 
first death to the second. Does not this collective representa- 
tion, too, make manifest the mystic, prelogical character of 
primitive mentality ? The law of participation which governs 
this mentality causes the primitive to regard the mystic 
relation which binds spirit to flesh and bones as perfectly 
simple, incomprehensible as it appears to logical thought. In 
one sense, the dead man 7s this flesh and these bones; in 
another sense, he is something quite different, and the two 
propositions are not mutually exclusive, because, to the 
primitive mind, “to be’”’ means ‘to participate of.” The 
decay of the dead man’s flesh is what logical thought would 
define as the sign, the condition, cause, and the very fact 
of the second death. When it has taken place, death, too, 
has been accomplished, i.e. the bond between the individual 
and his social group is definitely ruptured. 


* Dr. Pechuél-Loesche, Die Loango-Expedition, iii. 2, Dw Atm 
? Hobley, ‘“ British East Africa: Kavirondo and Nandi,” J-A.T., xxxiii. 


PP: 339-40. <0 LÉ 
3 The Religious System of China, i. pp. 106, 127. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 323 


IV 


Among the customs accompanying either the first or the 
second funeral ceremony, or even both, I shall refer, by way of 
example, to a series in which the mystic, prelogical nature of 
primitive mentality is clearly to be seen. As a general rule it 
consists of burying with the dead, or else simply destroying, 
everything that has belonged to him. Such a custom is 
maintained everywhere among undeveloped peoples, almost 
without exception. We learn that the Aruntas, in the case of 
a man’s death, cut off his hair, but his neck and arm ornaments 
and the fur string used for winding round his head are all 
carefully preserved to be used afterwards. (These are indeed 
objects possessed of highly magic value which the Australian 
has himself received either from ancestors or other relatives. 
He has merely been, as it were, enjoying the usufruct thereof, 
and they somewhat resemble the churinga. . . .) But as soon 
as the interment has taken place, the camp of the man or 
woman is immediately burnt, and everything in it destroyed. 
In the case of women, absolutely nothing is preserved.1 . In 
South Australia, too, ‘‘ all that belonged to the dead man, his 
weapons, fishing-nets, etc., are placed in the grave with his 
body.”’? In the Victoria district, the medicine-man throws 
into the grave all the personal effects of the dead man that he 
has been able to collect . . . he then inquires if there is any- 
thing else, and if he hears of anything he has it brought and 
put with them. Every single thing that has belonged to the 
living must be placed near his corpse.3—In the Bismarck 
Archipelago, “‘ all the deceased’s movable property is placed 
on the tomb; and only after the expiration of three weeks is 
it burnt.” 4—The Bororo suffer considerable loss when a 
member of the family dies, for everything he has used is burnt 
or thrown into the river, or buried’ with him.s Dobrizhoffer 
tells us the same about the Abipones. “All the utensils 
belonging to the lately deceased are burnt on a bier. Besides 


: Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 497. 

2 Beveridge, “ The Aborigines of the Lower Murray,” Journal of the 
Royal Society of New South Wales, p. 29 (1884). ; 

3 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, 1. p. 104. 

4 Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Stidsee, p. 441. 

s K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvolkern Zentralbräsiliens, pp. 384-9. 


324 HOW NATIVES THINK 


the horses killed at the tomb, they slay his small cattle if he 
have any. The house which he inhabited they pull entirely 
to pieces. His wife, children and the rest of the family remove 
elsewhere, and having no house of their own, reside for a 
time in that of some other person, or lodge miserably on mats. 
To utter the name of a lately deceased person is reckoned 
a nefarious vice amongst the Abipones.’’! In California the 
Komacho sacrifice everything belonging to the deceased, even 
to his horse. With the Nishinam, as soon as life is extinct the 
body is burned, and with it everything the deceased possessed. 
The Wintus throw into the grave everything that they possibly 
can of a man’s former belongings, knives, rakes, old whisky 
bottles, oyster-cans, etc., and everything that cannot be 
buried is burnt. When an Indian of high rank dies his wig- 
wam is burned down. ‘The name of the dead is never 
mentioned more.” —‘‘ The Hurons either bury or else enclose 
with the corpse cakes, oil, skins, axes, kettles, and other 
implements so that the soul of their relative may not dwell in 
poverty and distress for lack of these things.” 3 In Vancouver, 
everything belonging to the dead is placed near his body; 
otherwise he would return to take it away. Sometimes even > 
his house is razed to the ground.4 The Zuñis, too, destroy or 
burn nearly everything that has belonged to a dead man. 

The same custom is widely prevalent throughout Africa, 
and even where it no longer obtains, we still find traces of it. 
On the Slave Coast, for instance, “‘ the children are not the sole 
inheritors of their parents: the uncles on both sides having 
also proprietorial rights. For this reason the children take all 
the valuables from their father’s house when they see his end 
approaching. And his brothers hasten likewise in the last 
hours to take as much as they can of his movable possessions.’ 
The same missionary, however, informs us: ‘‘ The dead man 
has been placed in his grave with many coverings, but nothing 
else is placed inside or upon it. Formerly pots containing fatty 
substances were broken over it, but this custom is no longer 
observed.” 6—In the Ba-yaka tribe, ‘when a man dies all his 

1 Dobrizhoffer, op. cit., ii. pp. 273-4. 

2 Powers, Tribes of California, pp. 173, 239, 328. 

3 Fr. Sagard, Le Grand Voyage au Pays des Hurons, p. 233 (1632). 
‘ 


F. Boas, op. cit., p. 575. 
5 Spieth, Die Ewe-stämme, p. 120. 6 Ibid., p. 256. 





PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 325 


vessels are shattered, and the pieces left on his tomb.’ In 
South Africa, as we learn from Macdonald, when the funeral 


 solemnities have been completed and the party of mourners 


has dispersed, the house which the deceased was occupying 
when his death occurred is burnt, together with all its 
contents, even valuable things, corn, implements, weapons, 
ornaments, charms, as well as furniture, beds and bedding: 
everything must be destroyed by fire.? 

In South India, as soon as a Savara is dead, a gun is fired 
at his door to help the spirit to escape. The corpse is washed, 
taken to the family burying-ground, and burnt. Everything 
a man possesses—bows, arrows, hatchets, daggers, necklets, 
clothes, rice, etc.—is burned with his body.3 And lastly, not 
to prolong the list unduly, we have De Groot’s testimony that 
in China at one time a man’s death entailed the complete ruin 
of his family. By degrees the custom of burying all his valu- 
ables with the deceased fell into disuse, though it has not 
entirely disappeared. At the same time, he tells us, the ao, 
or filial obligations, became more and more imperative. 
Accordingly children, while avoiding the actual renunciation 
of their parents’ estate, were all the more zealous in preserving 
the outward aspect of such a renunciation . . . by dressing in 
the cheapest garments and eating the simplest food possible.4 

The current interpretation of such practices as these refers 
them to the following general motives: to provide the dead 
with all that he requires, so that he may not be unhappy in 
his new state, and, if it is a case of some important personage, 
to furnish him with the means of maintaining his rank ; —to 
rid the living of objects which death has rendered unclean and 
therefore unusable; (this would explain, for instance, the 
almost universal custom of burning or pulling down the house 
in which the death has occurred) ;—to avoid any risk that the 
dead man, exercising jealous supervision over the survivors, 
may be tempted to return and seek his possessions. That such 
motives, or at any rate one or other of them, should influence 


: Torday and Joyce, “‘ Notes on the Ethnography of the Ba-yaka,” J 7: 19 
XXXVI. P. 43. 

a2 Macdonald, ‘‘ Manners and Customs... of South African Tribes,’’ 
Punt, xix... 27G, 

3 E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India,” p. 206. 

4 The Religious System of China, i. p. 474. 


326 HOW NATIVES THINK 


those who practise these observances, cannot be doubted in a 
great number of instances. Very often both explorers and 
missionaries expressly mention them. 

Occasionally, however, they ask themselves whether these 
motives are really sufficient to account for a custom so extra- 
ordinary, and apparently so subversive of the evident interests 
of the survivors. In the Congo, for instance, ‘‘ the dead man 
is first adorned with all his ornaments, and everything he 
possesses that is valuable, for all this must perish with him. 
Why should this be so? If it were from motives of avarice, 
that he should not be separated from his wealth even in the 
grave, the same sentiment would influence his heir, who would 
refuse to be thus mulcted. From all that I have been able to 
gather, they act in this way from blind obedience to the Kissy 
who enjoins it upon them, and they are too ignorant to be 
able to argue about their religion, to which they implicitly 
submit.”’ 1 

It is true that it occasionally happens that observers, in 
relating these facts, confuse them with what seems to them the 
most natural explanation. We do find, however, that such 
motives are explicitly attributed to them. ‘“‘ They think and 
believe that the spirits of these utensils, axes, daggers and all 
that they dedicate to them (especially at the great Feast of 
the Dead) proceed to the other world to be of use to the spirits 
of the dead, whilst the bodies of these skins, utensils, axes, 
etc., dwell in the bier and in the grave with the bones of the 
dead. This was their invariable reply when we told them that 
mice ate the bread and oil, and that moth and rust attacked 
the skins and the weapons that they buried in the graves of 
their relatives and friends.”’ 2 

Yet very often these customs are maintained even when 
their original meaning has been lost. Those who still observe 
them never fail to interpret them in accordance with their 
ideas and sentiments at the time, just as myths may be hidden 
under many layers of additional illustrative matter of a con- 
trary meaning, when the collective representations in which 
they originated have been modified by the social milieu. We 
may indeed admit that with primitive peoples among whom — 


* Degrandpré, Voyage à la Côte Occidentale d’Afrique, i. pp. 147-8 (1801). 
> Fr. Sagard, Le Grand Voyage au Pays des Hurons, pp. 233-4 (1632). 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 327 


the custom of destroying all that belongs to the dead still 
obtains, the motives we have indicated above are those which 
natives attribute to themselves, and yet ask ourselves whether, 
as a matter of fact, these customs ought not to be referred to 
other collective representations which are peculiar to mystic, 
prelogical mentality. 

According to our view, these customs imply a special 
participation both imagined and felt. The things that a man 
has used, the clothes he has worn, his weapons, ornaments, 
are part of him, are his very self, (construing the verb “ to be ” 
as ‘‘to participate’’), just like his saliva, nail-parings, hair, 
excreta, although to a lesser extent. Something has been 
communicated to them by him which is, as it were, a con- 
tinuance of his individuality, and in a mystic sense these 
objects are henceforward inseparable from him. By virtue of 
a kind of polarization, they are not weapons and ornaments in 
general: they are the weapons and ornaments of So-and-so, 
and they cannot be deprived of this distinguishing character- 
istic, or become the weapons and ornaments of any other. 
Now primitive mentality regards the mystic features of things 
and their occult properties as by far the most important. 
Oriented differently from our logical thinking, this mentality 
tends to methods of functioning which are quite unlike our 
own, and, from the utilitarian point of view, often irrational. 


For instance, the chief may have resolved upon a hunting 


expedition early the next day, and instead of going to rest so 
that they may be thoroughly refreshed and ready, the Bororo 
will spend the night in singing and dancing: Von den 
Steinen, who is greatly astonished at such a proceeding, does 
not realize that in the opinion of the Bororo the capture of the 
game depends far more upon the mystic influence exercised 
upon it by the songs and dances, than upon the skill and 
agility of the hunters. Again, when we consider the immense 
amount of work which the manufacture of their weapons, 
canoes, and implements often entails upon the natives, we feel 
inclined to ask how they can sacrifice the product of so much 
effort and patience every time that a death occurs. But to 
them the efficacy and utility of weapons and implements is 
quite a secondary matter, compared with the mystic bond 


1 Unter den Naturvôlkern Zentralbräsiliens, p. 367. 


328 HOW NATIVES THINK 


which unites them with the individual who has made and used 
and possessed them. If this man should die, what is to be- 
come of his belongings ? Such a question does not even occur 
to the primitive mind.1 There are not several possible alter- 
natives, for so strong is the participation between him and all 
that belongs to him that the idea of utilizing these things 
apart from him cannot present itself. These things must of 
course go with him. They will be placed near his body, and 
since they are usually regarded as animate, they, too, will pass 
into the neighbouring region whither death (in its first stage) 
has transferred him. 

We can readily perceive that the motives just appealed to 
do not contradict the mystic origin of such practices. It 
would be dangerous to appropriate these things, for instance, 
for he who made use of them would run the risk of arousing 
the dead man’s anger, and might be the object of his ven- 
geance. Or again, the dead man may be grateful for the care 
that has been taken in seeing that his belongings accompany 
him and, as a recompense, he will refrain from disturbing the 
peace of the survivors, etc. These motives are only secondary, 
however. They are to be accounted for by the original 
mystic bond between the dead man and his possessions, whilst 
this bond is not to be accounted for by them, but arises 
directly out of collective representations familiar to prelogical 
mentality. To it, at this stage, possession, property, use, are 
not distinguishable from participation. This mystic bond 
cannot be destroyed by death, seeing that the dead man 
continues to live, and his relations with the social group are 
not ruptured ; far from it. As we should express it, he remains 
the proprietor of everything that is his, and the customs we 
are studying merely attest that this property is recognized as 
his. We must simply understand that, at the moment, this 
property constitutes a mystic relation, a participation between 
the possessor and the things possessed. It is not even per- 
missible to conceive of the property passing into other hands, 
or, if it does pass, that it may be of any use whatever,—to say 

1 “ I asked him again why they buried the clothing of the dead with them. 
‘They belong to them,’ answered the Indian, ‘why should we take them 
away ?’”’ (Relations des Jésuites, v. p. 130 (1633).—"" ‘ We never speak about 


the dead again,’ he said to me; ‘even the relatives of a dead man never 
use the things which he used when alive.’ ”’ (Ibid., v. p. 134.) 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 329 


nothing of the dire consequences which the very violation of 
this mystic bond would entail. 

Although investigators are, as a rule, very far from thinking 
thus, it often happens that their language more or less clearly 
confirms the idea. In the first place, they often tell us that 
the things buried, shattered, or sacrificed are the personal 
possessions of the deceased, i.e. those things he had himself 
made, or had exclusively used. The destruction does not 
usually extend to objects which would be the property (speak- 
ing in the mystic sense) of other members of his family. ‘A 
widow retains all the baskets and trinkets made by herself.”’ 7 
We are told that in New Guinea, some of the bows and arrows 
belonging to a dead man and most of the things he has used, 
are broken to pieces on his grave and left there to witness to 
the fact of his incapability to use them more. A similar 
practice takes place with regard to cooking utensils, and the 
materials for women’s work ; her skirt is also left on the tomb, 
with everything she was wearing at the time of her death.? 
Sometimes, too, the observer points out the mystic nature of 
the bond uniting the dead with the objects he possessed. 
‘ The dead man’s garments, weapons, utensils are buried with 
him . . . his canoe of bark is placed upside down on his tomb 
or else set adrift on the stream. All the objects which have 
belonged to him and which cannot be concealed with him are 
sacrificed. They are burned, thrown into the water, or else 
they are hung in the trees, because they are etn’ary étay, i.e. 
‘anathema.’ This is a new species of taboo, the use of 
which is often found elsewhere.’’3 The comparison is, in my 
opinion, a very just one; seeing that this taboo is imposed 
with regard to those who form part of the same social or 
religious group, but is not binding on others. So, too, with 
the Ba-Ronga, when a man is dead, “ his clothes and every- 
thing else he wore are thrown into his deserted hut. His 
dishes and drinking-vessels are broken on his grave; nobody 
dare touch them again . . .” Junod adds in a note, how- 
ever: ‘except the Christians. . . . One of our converts at 
Rikatla, Lois, told me smilingly that she had been well able 


1 Powers, Tribes of California, p. 249 (Shastika). 

a Edelfelt, ‘‘ Customs and Superstitions of New Guinea Natives,” Proc. of 
Roy. Geo. Soc. of Australia, vii. p. 20 (1891). 

3 Petitot, Dictionnaire de la Langue Déné-dindjié, p. xxvi. 


330 HOW NATIVES THINK 


to complete her store of crockery by buying that of a dead 
man, his heirs having parted with it for almost nothing.” ! 
This last is a very significant fact. The mystic bond between 
a dead man and his possessions is doubtless no longer powerful 
enough in the Ba-Ronga people for it to be necessary to reduce 
them to the same condition as his present one. They are, 
however, taboo for the survivors, who destroy them rather 
than make use of them. But the proof that they do not 
destroy them so that the dead shall not use them, or for fear 
he may come to look for them, is seen in the fact that they do 
not scruple to sell them to natives who have become Christians. 

In the same way, among the Hos, the Dravidians of Bengal, 
on the death of a man all his personal effects are destroyed. 
This is not with the idea that the dead derives any advantage 
from it, however. ‘ The Hos have always given a negative 
answer to this question. They gave me the same explanation 
as the Chulikata Mishmis of Upper Assam had given: namely, 
that they are unwilling to derive any immediate benefit from 
the death of a member of their family, so they commit to the 
flames all his personal effects, the clothes and vessels he had 
used, the weapons he carried, and the money he had about 
him. But new things that have not been used are not treated 
as things that he appropriated, and they are not destroyed. 
It often happens that venerable old Hos abstain from wearing 
new garments which they have become possessed of, to save 
them from being wasted at the funeral.” 2 We could hardly 
find an instance that more clearly shows that the very essence 
of property is a mystic bond established between the owner 
and the objects which participate in it in some way, because 
they have been used or worn by him, and that if these things 
are destroyed when their owner dies, it is because death does 
not break the mystic bond. The participation continues to 
exist, and on the one hand it is opposed to any use being made 
of the things, and on the other, it decides the customs which 
put them, as it were, at the disposal of the dead. It is not 
even indispensable that the things should be destroyed. A 
dead man may remain the owner of living wealth. ‘ There 
are spirits (dead) who become very rich in cattle and slaves, © 


x Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, p. 58. 
2 Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, i. p. 334. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 331 


by reason of the continual offerings made to them: these 
cattle are regarded as sacred, and the parents of the dead man 
to whose spirit they belong guard them carefully.” ! 

Possibly it is in this persistent participation between the 
dead and that which is mystically united with him as property, 
that we must seek for the reason of a good many customs 
relating to mourning, especially to customs which are often so 
cruel, so complicated, and so prolonged as those imposed on 
widows among certain primitive peoples. There are many 
facts which would tend to such a belief. Firstly, as a rule, the 
widow ceases to observe these practices at the precise moment 
when the ceremony which ends the mourning has taken place, 
i.e. the moment when the second time of death is over ; when, 
death having been perfected, the relations between the 
deceased and the social group are definitely ruptured. But 
during the time that elapses between the death and the final 
ceremony the dead man, even after the first obsequies, pays 
special attention to the behaviour of his widow. He watches 
over her, ready to intervene if she does not observe every 
detail of the mourning. The dead man’s near relatives under- 
take to see that she does not avoid any of them: otherwise, 
they may chastise her, and sometimes even kill her. There- 
fore the bond between her and her dead husband must be a 
very strong one. In the second place, during his lifetime 
this bond in many respects resembled that which we have 
termed property, in the mystic sense in which prelogical 
mentality conceives of it. With many primitive peoples, from 
the day of her marriage a woman who until then had been 
allowed the greatest sexual liberty, becomes taboo for the 
members of any group except her husband’s.2 She only belongs 
to him because he has acquired her, sometimes at great cost, 
and adultery is accordingly a kind of theft. Between him and 
her a participation has been established which no doubt makes 
her dependent upon him, but at the same time makes her 
actionsreflect uponhim. If heis hunting or fighting, for instance, 


t J. Roscoe, “‘ The Bahima, a Cow Tribe of Enkole,”’ J.A.J., xxxvii. p. 109. 

2 With the Maoris of New Zealand, for instance, formerly every woman 

. could select as many companions as she liked, without being thought 
guilty of any impropriety, until given away by her friends to someone as 
her future master; she then became tapu to him, and was liable to be put 
to death if found unfaithful’? (R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 167). 


332 HOW NATIVES THINK 


his success and his very life may be endangered by some im- 
prudence or unconsidered act of his wife’s. If he repudiates 
her, the mystic tie is ruptured; but if he has not repudiated 
her, and he dies, the participation between her and the dead 
man still subsists with all the consequences it entails. 
_. Strictly speaking, these should involve the death of the 
widow. We find innumerable instances of such a custom, 
even among peoples already somewhat civilized, especially 
when the dead husband was a person of some importance. 
At the death of more than one petty African king, his wives, 
or at least some of them, sacrificed themselves. Formerly, 
Ellis tells us, the king had hardly breathed his last than the 
women of the palace would begin to break the furniture, 
ornaments, vessels, and lastly, kill themselves.1 We know 
that in India, in the Far East, above all in China, the suicide 
of widows uponstheir husbands’ graves is still very common. 
De Groot speaks of this in very significant terms. “ The 
most numerous class,” he says, “is that which comprises the 
suicides perpetrated by widows wishing to escape the chance 
of being remarried or of being in some other way deprived of 
their chastity. Indeed, being the property of her husband 
after his death, a woman of good principles cannot but consider 
it an act of the highest injustice towards his manes, nay, of 
theft, to surrender herself up to another . . . and so rejoin 
him in the life hereafter in a state less pure than that in which 
he left her behind. These considerations are obviously very 
old, being traceable to a certain tribe . . . which was in the . 
habit of casting out many a widowed wife into the wilderness 
because she was now wife to a spirit, treating her in fact as the 
Chinese of the present day generally do the inanimate personal 
effects of the deceased.”’ 2 
But the widow is “ the wife of a spirit ” for a time only, 
until the ceremony which perfects death and breaks the last 
tie between the dead man and his social group can be cele- 
brated. She may therefore be allowed to live, provided that 
she does so in a way which will not anger the spirit of the 
dead who is still her master, and cause him to return to vindi- 
cate his rights, and thus disturb the peace of the social group. 


1 A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, p. 128. 
2 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, i. p. 744. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 333 


This accounts for most of the practices enjoined upon the 
widow, even though those who impose them are frequently 
obeying other impulses, such as avoiding contamination (for 
a widow is rendered unclean by the death of her husband, and 
might communicate this impurity to the survivors, etc.). 
Moreover, in these utilitarian motives there still remains a 
trace of the mystic bond whence the original meaning of such 
practices is derived. But these motives are secondary ones, 
whilst the mystic bond is the main point. Without entering 
into the very complex details of the mourning customs which 
it is not my object to explain here, a few examples will suffice 
to show that until the ceremony which makes death complete, 
the woman in a mystic sense remains the property of her dead 
husband, and that special rites are necessary to bring this 
participation to an end. 

In the northern tribes of Central Australia, ‘the za 
(younger brother) of the dead man cuts off the widow’s hair, 
and afterwards burns it. . .. We must add that sooner or 
later the woman will become the property of the za. The 
woman’s hair is thrown into the fire, and she covers her body 
with ashes from the camp fire and continues to do so during 
the period of her mourning. If she did not do this, the atn- 
rinja or spirit of the dead, which follows her everywhere, 
would kill her and strip her bones of their flesh.””! The 
mourning over, and the dead man departed for his camp in the 
Alcheringa, the woman is given to one of his younger brothers, 
but this is not accomplished without much ceremonial. 
Finally, ‘‘ one night, the /ubra comes to the ttia’s camp, but 
the two sleep on opposite sides of the fire. On the next day, 
the itia hands her over to men who stand in the relationship of 
unkalla, okilia, itia, gammona and oknia, i.e. to men repre- 
sentative of all classes. All of them have access to her and 
make her presents of alpita, red ochre, fur-string, etc., which 
she carries to the itia’s camp, where he decorates her with the 
string. Previously he has sent by the /wbra, an offering of 
spears and shields to each man—a gift which is necessary, or 
else, later on, they might kill him if he had taken possession 
of the widow without both offering them the present and 
allowing them to have access to her. If one ztza does not 

1 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 507. 


334 HOW NATIVES THINK 


want her, then she is simply passed on to another.’’! It is 
not enough, therefore, that the bond between the woman and 
her first husband should be broken by death, for the mystic 
relationship to be established between her and her new master. 
She must be, as it were, disappropriated, in order to be appro- 
priated anew, and this can only be done by the brother of her 
dead husband. We think immediately of the levirate, and 
without failing to recognize the utilitarian or legal character 
which this custom has assumed among many peoples, we are 
inclined to think that it may have originated in collective 
representations of the same kind as those which induce the 
Australian aborigines to act thus. 

Among the Ba-Ronga, the persistence of the tie between 
the widow and her dead husband is well shown by the follow- 
ing customs. ‘In the weeks which follow the death of the 
husband two preliminary acts are carried out: (1) that 
which is called the escape into the bush. The widow leaves the 
village of the dead secretly. She goes far away, to a neigh-- 
bourhood where she is unknown, and there she establishes a 
connection with somebody or other, a man of loose character, 
to whom she yields herself. In any case he will not make her 
a mother. She escapes from him and takes flight once more. 
(2) She returns home, assured that ‘she has managed to get 
rid of her trouble.’ She is free from the curse or the stain 
which became hers on account of her husband’s death. Shortly 
afterwards, one of the dead man’s relatives, he who is the heir 
presumptive of this woman, comes to her, bringing her a 
present . . . begging her to take it to her parents and tell 
them that So-and-so has ‘come for her.’ Henceforward this 
man will watch over her. He will look after her harvest, will 
take her to visit the dead man’s village. But she will not 
leave her home for a whole year. She will till the land yet 
once more for the dead husband, and it is only when the last 
award of the inheritance is made that she goes to her new 
master and becomes his wife. . . . 

‘ But the wife thus obtained by inheritance is not the 
property of the heir to the same extent as a wife he would 
have purchased. She remains, at heart, the property of the 


1 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 
509-10 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 335 


eldest son of the dead. She is only a wife pour le sommeil. 
The children she had by her first husband will not belong to 
the second, but to the eldest son of the first. Nor will any of 
those which may be born of her new relationship belong to the 
heir. He is deemed to be still working for his dead brother 
(or his uncle on the mother’s side) and the offspring of this 
kind of semi-marriage, too, will belong to the real hereditary 
heir, the eldest son. One of the daughters who may be born 
to him will belong to him alone. On the other hand, he has 
the advantage of receiving his bowl of cooked food every 
evening from this new wife.’’! In this case, the disappro- 
priation of the widow does not actually become complete and, 
since among the Ronga tribe property has already been 
moulded into a legal form, the lasting participation between a 
woman and her dead husband is interpreted in terms expres- 
sive of the conditions governing individuals. 

Some at least, therefore, of the customs relating to mourn- 
ing would seem to refer to that permanent participation 
which, in the prelogical mind, corresponds with that which 
logical thinking regards as the concept of property. At this 
stage, however, it is not a concept : it is still one of the repre- 
sentations which are both general and concrete, many examples 
of which we have already studied, which never appear save 
enveloped in a complex of mystic ideas and sentiments. The 
object possessed participates in the nature of the possessor ; 
the objects possessed by a dead man participate in his nature, 
at any rate until the closing ceremony of the period of 
mourning, and they inspire the same feelings as the deceased. 

For similar reasons the property of a living person is no 
less inviolable. The objects a man possesses participate in 
their owner to such an extent that no other would care to take 
them from him. With the Macusis of Guiana, for instance, 
“each individual’s property, whether it be his hut, his 
utensils, or the patch of ground he cultivates, is sacred. Viola- 
tion of this property, save in case of war, is scarcely possible, 
and disputes respecting mine and thine are accordingly 
extremely rare”? It is therefore sufficient to indicate by 
an outward sign that a person possesses a thing for it to be- 


t Junod, Les Ba-Ronga, pp. 67 
2 Richard Schomburgk, Run A ie “British Guiana, il. Pp. 321. 


336 HOW NATIVES THINK 


come inviolate. ‘‘ We are told that the Cumana natives used 
to surround their plantations by a simple woollen thread or 
by a creeper two feet above the ground, and that their property 
was thus absolutely protected; for it would have been a 
serious crime to cross this barrier, and all believed that he who 
tried to do so would shortly die. The same belief still obtains 
among the Indians of the Amazon.” ! In New Zealand, “a 
person often leaves his property in exposed places, with merely 
this simple ¢ohu or sign (a piece of drift timber with something 
tied round it) to show that it is private, and generally it is 
allowed to remain untouched, however many may pass that 
way. . .. with a simple bit of flax on the door of a man’s 
house, containing all his valuables, his line, or his food store ; 
they are thus rendered inviolable and no one would meddle 
with them.’’? In other words, “if anyone wanted to pre- 
serve his crop, his house, his garments or anything else, he 
made them fapu ; a tree which had been selected in the forest 
for a canoe (which he could not yet use) . . . he rendered 
tapu by tying a band round it with a little grass in it.”’ 3 
Since the property is thus made “‘ sacred ” there is no need 
to defend it by external means, and this is true of that which 
belongs to groups as of that which is personal. According to 
Brough Smyth, the area of ground owned by each tribe was 
definitely known to all its members, and as carefully drawn as 
if a land-surveyor had defined its limits and reckoned its 
superficies.4 It is the same with the aborigines of Central 
Australia, and Spencer and Gillen tell us that these limits are 
never disputed and that one tribe would not think of appro- 
priating territory belonging to another. What would it do 
with it, if it had it? The idea of such territories is above all 
a mystic one, and that which dominates it is not the quantity 
of game or of water to be found there; it is its division into 
“local totem centres ”’ in which the spirits which are awaiting 
their reincarnation in the tribe dwell. How would it avail 
another tribe to expel the one whose ancestors have lived 
there and who still inhabit it in mystic fashion ? The partici- 
pation between the social group and the soil is so close that 


1 Von Martius, Beitrage zur Ethnographie Stid-Amerika’s, i. p. 86. 
2 R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 63. 3 Ibid., p. 58. 
4 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, i. p. 139. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 337 


the idea that the soil may be disappropriated does not even 
occur to them. In such conditions the property is, as 
Schomburgk puts it, “ sacred ” : it is inviolable and inviolate 
as long as the collective representations which we have noted 
maintain their empire over the mind. 

In certain cases this mystic sentiment of property may even 
become an obstacle to exchange. To give away a thing one 
possesses is giving something of oneself, and therefore it means 
giving to another a power over oneself. Barter is a process 
which involves mystic elements, and however advantageous 
or tempting it may be, a primitive often starts by refusing 
altogether. Lumholtz tells us “they are chary of selling to 
strangers. When a Mexican wants to buy a sheep, or some 
corn, or a girdle, the Tarahumare will first deny that he has 
anything to sell. . . . A purchase however establishes a kind 
of brotherhood between the two negotiants, who afterwards call 
each other navagua and a confidence is established between 
them almost of the same character as that which exists between 
compadres among the Mexicans.” 1 


V 


When the period of mourning has been ended by the final 
ceremony, the death of the individual is complete, in the 
sense that his relations with the social group of which he was 
a member when alive are entirely ruptured. If everything 
that belonged to him has not been destroyed, it is disposed of, 
and his widow may become the wife of another. His very 
name, which it was forbidden to pronounce, may be heard 
once more among certain primitives. Does this imply that 
all reciprocal influence has disappeared? From the logical 
point of view, not admitting of contradictory standards, this 
would seem to be the necessary consequence. It is not so to 
the prelogical mind, which finds no embarrassment in contra- 
diction, at any rate in its collective representations. On the 
one hand, now that the final ceremony has taken place, there 
is nothing either to be feared or to be hoped from the dead. 
On the other hand, however, the social group feels that it 
lives in very close dependence with respect to its dead, in 

1 C, Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, i. p. 244. 
22 


338 HOW NATIVES THINK 


general. It exists and subsists only through them. Firstly, 
it is necessarily recruited from among them. Then there is 
the respect with which the churinga of the Australian abori- 
gines, for instance, is surrounded,—for these churinga which 
represent the ancestors, ave indeed these ancestors, in the 
meaning of the word according to the law of participation— 
the totem ceremonies periodically celebrated by. the tribes, 
upon which their welfare depends, and finally the other insti- 
tutions testifying to a participation between the living group 
and its dead, which is most intensely realized. It is not 
merely a question of the dead who are still near, whose bodies 
have not yet entirely decayed, but above all of the dead who 
have started for their camp in the Alcheringa, who are no less 
present in their churinga, and also in their nanja, in the place 
in which their mythical ancestor disappeared beneath the soil. 
Here we have difficulties which would be insurmountable 
to logical thinking, which cannot admit the multipresence of 
individuals, and their simultaneous inhabitation of several. 
different localities. We find it hard enough to conceive that 
in the period previous to the closing ceremony, which marks 
the definite departure of the dead, a dead man can at one and 
the same time dwell in his grave with his body, and yet be 
present, as a kind of tutelary deity, in the house that was his 
home; yet to the Chinese, for instance, there is nothing 
inconceivable in the idea. Still less can we reduce to a 
thoroughly intelligible schema the collective representations 
of Australian aborigines with respect to those who are 
“entirely ” dead. We can neither define in one clear concept 
the personality of these dead, nor form any satisfactory idea 
of the way in which the living group participates in their 
existence, and in which it is ‘ participated ’’ by them, accord- 
ing to Malebranche’s use of the term. What is actually 
certain is that this reciprocal participation is real, as we have 
already seen, that it is not to be confused with that which in 
other peoples is called ancestor-worship, and that it relates to 
the characteristics which are peculiar to prelogical mentality. 
When a child is born a definite personality reappears, or, 
to put it more precisely, is formed again. All birth is a rein- 
carnation. “There is a vast ensemble of peoples, negroes, 
t Vide Chap. II. pp.. 90. et seq. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 339 


Malays, Polynesians, Indians (the Sioux, Algonquin, Iroquois, 
Pueblo groups of the north-west), Esquimaux, Australians, 
among whom the reincarnation of the dead and the inheri- 
tance of the individual name in the family or the clan is the 
rule. With the peoples of North-western America, the indi- 
vidual is born with his name, his social functions, and his 
coat-of-arms ready made. ... The number of individuals, 
of names, spirits, and rôles in the clan is limited, and its 
existence is but an ensemble of deaths and rebirths of identical 
beings. With the Australian aborigines and the Negritos, the 
same phenomenon obtains, though not so clearly marked . . 
as a necessary institution. From its beginning the clan is 
conceived as attached to a certain spatial district, the ancestral 
home of the totem-spirits, the rocks in which the ancestors are 
buried, whence the children which are to be conceived issue, 
and finally, whence are derived the spirits of the totem animals, 
the reproduction of which is secured by the clan.” ! 

Birth, just like death, then, is merely the transition from 
_ one form of life to another. Just as, for the individual, for the 
first momeats at any rate, the latter is but a change of con- 
dition and of residence, all the rest being as before, so birth is 
but the transference, through the medium of its parents, of the 
child to the light of day. “~ The child is not the direct result 
of the intercourse ; it may come without this, which merely, 
as it were, prepares the mother for the reception, and birth 
also, of an already-formed spirit-child who inhabits one of 
the local totem centres.’’2 Seeing what the general orienta- 
tion of prelogical mentality is, and the paramount interest 
which the mystic factors in every phenomenon claim, would 
not the physiological aspect of birth disappear from the primi- 
tive’s field of vision, lost in the infinitely more important idea 
of the totemic ties subsisting between child and parents ? 
Birth, like life, death, disease, must inevitably be represented 
in mystic fashion, and in the form of participation. In the 
tribes of Northern Australia, ‘‘ descent both of class and 
totem are strictly paternal. A spirit-child is not supposed to 
go into any woman unless she be the wife of a man belonging 
to the same moiety and totem as the spirit. As a general rule, 


1 Mauss, Année Sociologique, vol. ix. p. 267. 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes a Central Australia, p. 265. 


/ 


340 HOW NATIVES THINK / 


the spirit is supposed to enter a woman whose children are 
born into the class to which it, the spirit, itself belongs.” 
These spirits are, as it were, lying in wait for a possible mother, 
in the various totem centres in which they reside, and each 
deliberately chooses the mother it desires, without making 
any mistake. ‘If the wife of a snake-man were to conceive 
a spirit at the spot inhabited by bee-spirits, it would simply 
mean that a snake-spirit had followed the father up from his 
own place and had gone inside the woman.” A woman who 
does not desire a child carefully avoids passing these local 
totem centres, and if she finds it inevitable she runs quickly 
by, begging the spirit-children not to enter her.! 

The same idea of conception occurs elsewhere. Among the 
Baganda, for instance, ‘‘ should a child be still-born, or die in 
infancy, it is buried at four cross-roads, and thorns are placed 
upon the grave. Every woman who passes by throws a few 
blades of grass upon the grave to prevent the ghost from 
entering into her and the child being reborn.’ In the 
French Congo, children whose mothers have died in childbed are 
thrown into the bush, but near the road, “in order that their 
souls may choose a new mother from the women who pass by.” 3 

A belief that is widely prevalent among the tribes of 
different parts of Australia clearly shows that the reincarna- 
tion of spirits, or that which we call birth, is conceived of as 
independent of physiological conditions. White men are 
thought to be ancestors who have returned to the world. 
‘“ Miago assured me that this was the current opinion, and my 
own personal observation subsequently confirmed his state- — 
ment. At Perth, one of the settlers, from his presumed like- — 
ness to a defunct member of the tribe of the Murray river, was 
visited by his supposed kindred twice every year, though in so 
doing they passed through sixty miles of what was not infre- 
quently an enemy’s country.” 4#—“ Since they have found out 
the existence of the race of white people, they have adopted 
the notion that their souls will hereafter appear in the bodies 
of such white people. . . . It may be instanced as a proof of 
how firmly they do believe, or rather, have believed this, that 


t Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 170. 

2 Roscoe, ‘‘ Manners and Customs of the Baganda,” J.A.J., xxxii. p. 30. 
3 Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, p. 478. 

4 Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, i. p. 60 (1846). 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 341 


_ in the idea they had recognized in some of the settlers natives 
_ long ago departed from life, they actually gave them the names 
| which these had gone by when alive. This notion is not 
confined to the Port Lincoln blacks, but prevails also with 
those of Adelaide and Victoria.” '—‘‘In the south-east 
portions of Australia, the old men used to say that the forms 
or spirits of the dead went to the westward, towards the 
setting sun; and the natives of West Australia had the same 
belief. When therefore they saw white men coming over the 
sea from that quarter, they at once took them to be their 
deceased relatives reincarnated.” 7—‘‘I found the belief 
among the Yantruwunter natives, that white men were once 
blacks. I was once asked by some old men how long it was 
since I was a blackfellow. . . . I was told that I had once 
been one of the Mungalle family.” 3—‘‘ Buckley, the white 
man who spent so many years with the wild natives of Port 
Philip, Victoria, is said to have owed his life to their assuming 
- that he was one of them who had come to life again. A 
similar belief was discovered at Port Lincoln, South Australia, 
in 1846, by Mr. Schiirmann, who says ‘ they certainly believe 
in the pre-existence of the souls of black men.’ ” 4—" On one 
occasion, Mr. Bland, in endeavouring to refute their belief, 
said: ‘Nonsense! I was never here before!’ and was 
answered, by an intelligent lad, ‘ Then how did you know the 
way here?’ .... This belief, however, began to die out 
as they saw that children were born to the white people.” 5 
This latter circumstance clearly proves that the natives had 
formerly held that the whites were the reincarnation of their 
dead relatives, who had not been through the process of actual 
birth. This is also the interpretation accorded to it by an 
excellent observer, Dr. W. E. Roth. He points out that in 
many of the North Queensland dialects the same word is found 
to do duty for a European and a deceased aboriginal’s spirit, 
ghost, etc., and he is satisfied ‘that instead of a return of the 








t Wilhelmi, ‘‘ Manners and Customs of Australian Natives,”’ etc., Trans 
Roy Soc., Vict., v. p. 189. 

a Chauncy, cited by Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, ii. p. 22. 

3 Howitt, Notes on the Aborigines of Cooper’s Creek, cited by Brough Smyth, 
The Aborigines of Victoria, ii. p. 307. | 

4 Mathews, ‘‘ Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales and Victoria,” 
Journal and Proceedings of Royal Society of New South Wales, p. 349 (1905). 

5 Chauncy, cited by Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, pp. 270, 274. 


342 HOW NATIVES THINK 


deceased native’s actual body after death in the form of a 
European, the meaning intended to be conveyed was that the 
vital principle (spirit, etc.) is reincarnated in the white man.”’1 

In any case, as a rule, the reincarnation takes place through 
the medium of pregnancy, and the spirit-child reincarnated 
already stands in a definite relation to the father and mother 
who engender it. It virtually formed part of the class or totem 
of one or other of them. But just as the man who has just . 
expired is scarcely dead, so the child which has just seen the 
light of day is only partially born. As we should put it, 
birth, like death, is accomplished in successive stages. As the © 
dead is only “ perfectly ’’ dead after the final ceremony ending 
the mourning period, and by virtue of that ceremony, so the 
newborn individual will not be perfected until after the 
final initiation ceremonies, and by virtue of these ceremonies. 
Perhaps the best way to explain these representations which 
are so familiar to prelogical mentality is to consider the com- 
plex system of participations. To the extent that the indivi- 
dual is engaged in, or apart from, certain of these, he is more 
completely born or more entirely dead. Most of the customs 
relating to the dead are intended to rupture their participation 
in the social group of the living, and to establish their partici- 
pation in that of deceased members of the same group. So, 
too, most of the practices relating to the newly-born, to 
children, and to novices, are designed to effect their increasing 
participation in the life of the social group to which they 
belong. 

The period immediately following the accouchement is 
mutatis mutandis identical with that which directly follows 
upon the drawing of the last breath. Like the latter, it is 
characterized by an extreme sensibility on the part of the 
subject. Undoubtedly, a newborn child does not inspire the 
same “‘ mixed ” sentiments as a person who has just died: one 
has no fear of it, nor does one feel a very lively affection for it. 
But one imagines it as frail and exposed to many dangers, 
just like the recently deceased. Practices relating to couvade, 
which we have already studied,? sufficiently prove the care of 


* The North Queensland Ethnography Bulletin, No. 5, pz 16 (1903), cited 
by The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, v. p. 355. 
? Vide supra, Chap. VI. pp. 256-260. 








PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 343 


it which is regarded as essential. Its participation in the 
living social group is still very limited. It has scarcely 
entered it, just as, at the moment of transition, a man is 
hardly more dead than alive. Nothing is yet decisive. The 
friends recall the spirit which has just left the body, they 
entreat it not to forsake those who love it, they feel it near 
to them. Similarly, the newborn being uttering its first cry 
is rather a candidate for life in the social group than a living 
entity. In this case, too, nothing is yet decisive. If there be 
any reason, however slight, for not admitting it, they will not 
hesitate to reject it. 


It seems that it is in these collective representations that 


we must seek the main origin of the infanticide which, in 


various forms, is so common among many primitive peoples. 
Sometimes it is the children of the female sex who are sacri- 
ficed, sometimes the opposite. Occasionally both twins are 
put to death, and again it may be only one; if they are of 
different sex, it may be in one case, the boy, and in another 
the girl; in certain aggregates, moreover, twin births are 
regarded as a happy event. Westermark has collected a vast 
amount of data on these practices. They are usually 
explained in the utilitarian sense: the mother who suckles 
one child cannot properly feed a second. In the Australian 
aborigines studied by Spencer and Gillen, infanticide is prac- 
tised everywhere for this reason. But should the mother 
have given the breast to the newborn child but once only, it 
is never killed.2 

However, this is not the only motive alleged. Among the 
Abipones, for instance, ‘‘ the mothers suckle their children for 
three years, during which time they have no carnal inter- 
course with their husbands who, tired of this long delay, often 
marry another wife. The women, therefore, kill their unborn 
babies for fear of repudiation. . . . I have known some who 
killed all the children they bore, no one either preventing or 
avenging these murders. The mothers bewail their children, 
who die of a disease, with sincere tears; yet they dash their 
newborn babes against the ground, or destroy them in some 


t Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, i. pp. 394 et seq., 458 et seq. 
2 Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 608-9. 


344 HOW NATIVES THINK 


other way, with calm countenances.” 1 In other places it is 
not the desire to retain the husbands, but economic reasons 
that make the appeal. Hawtrey tells us of the Lengua 
Indians of Paraguay that it is the woman’s task to bring the 
foodstuffs from garden and field, and that she does all the 
carrying. The Lenguas are a nomadic race, often covering 
ten to twenty miles in a day, and the woman carries all the 
household belongings, pots, water-jars, skins and blankets in 
a large string bag on her back. She may have an iron bar, or 
perhaps some domestic animal or bird to attend to with one 
hand, and she carries the child upon her shoulders, whilst the 
man walks ahead, carrying nothing but his bow and arrows. 
In such case it would be quite impossible for a mother to have 
more than one child to carry and look after. 

The importance of such divers motives is undeniable, and 
the influence they exert may, in the circumstances described, 
prove irresistible. But on the one hand, we do not find. 
infanticide always confined to cases in which the mother was 
already suckling one child, or indeed to those in which she 
fears that her husband may take another wife. On the other 
hand, these motives would scarcely suffice if the collective 
representations did not make infanticide—practised at the 
very moment of birth: this latter point is of capital import- 
ance—almost a matter of indifference, because the newborn 
child has but an infinitely small participation in the life of 
the social group. Thus the Gallinomero of California ‘‘ do 
not seem to have limited themselves to killing twins, or having 
made any distinction of sex, but cut off boy and girl alike, 
especially if deformed. When resorted to, the act was imme- 
diate. . . . If the child were allowed to live three days its 
life was thenceforth secure. They did not call it a ‘ relation ’ 
until they had decided to spare its life.’’ 3 

Moreover, the newborn who is suppressed does not die 
like the adult. The latter, having accomplished the cycle of 
participations in the world of the living, enters upon the first 
stage in the life of the dead, and must traverse it entirely 
before being born again. But the newborn, who is hardly 


1 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, ii. pp. 97-8. 

? Hawtrey, “ The Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco,” J.A.I., 
XXXI. P. 295. 

3 Powers, Tribes of California, p. 177. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 345 


alive, in the sense that he only slightly participates in the life 
_ of the social group, will remain, if his birth is not completed, 
at the portals of life, in the terminal period which abuts upon 
reincarnation. Death to him is scarcely a regression, and he 
remains an immediate candidate for the next life. Hence 
there is but slight scruple in disposing of him.# He is not 
suppressed, but delayed: possibly he will enter, even the 
following year, the very same mother. Spencer and Gillen 
expressly state this. “‘It must be remembered that the 
natives believe that the spirit part of the child returns at once 
to the Alcheringa home” (hence, without undergoing the 
ordinary stages) ‘and that it may very soon be born again, 
entering, very likely, the same woman.’’! This latter belief 
seems to make the indifference of the mothers in sacrificing 
their children less strange. The child is only taken from them 
for a time; they will find it again, and it will return to them. 

The Khonds of India were accustomed to rid themselves of 
female children at their birth, and the British had considerable 
trouble in inducing them to abandon this practice. It pro- 
ceeded from collective representations, the substance of which 
has been happily preserved for us. ‘‘ They believe that the 
reincarnation of a soul in the tribe, when it is first seen to 
animate a human form is completed only on the performing of 
the ceremony of naming the infant on the seventh day after 
its birth ; and they hold the curious doctrine that Boora sets 
apart a certain quantity of soul to be distributed amongst each 
generation of men. Thence they believe that if an infant die 
before it is named, its soul does not enter into the circle of 
tribal spirits, to be reborn as often as Dinga wills, but rejoins 
the mass of spirits set apart for the generation to which it 
belongs.” Here we perceive the reasons which make the 
Khonds act in this way. ‘‘ Thus by the destruction of a 
female infant, either the addition of a new female soul to the 
number of souls attached to a tribe is prevented, and the 
chance of getting a new male soul in its place is gained, or the 
return of a female soul by rebirth in that tribe is postponed.”’ 2 
But in any case the controlling idea is that the newborn child, 
since it is but an imperfect being, has not to die as the adult 


t The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 609. 
2 Macpherson, Memorials of Service in India, p. 131. 


: 
a 


346 HOW NATIVES THINK 


does. Forit, there is no question of rupturing participations, 
since they have not yet been established. 

If the child lives, that is, if for some good reason it is not 
‘‘ postponed,’ its welfare depends (by virtue of a mystic 
participation) upon the actions of its parents, the food they 
take, their labour and their repose, etc. ; and we already know 
how stringent are the regulations to which parents must 
submit. But above all, in order that the child may be 
released from the period in which his life is still uncertain, (as 
the death of the newly-dead is still uncertain) it is necessary 
for him to receive his name, and this in a ceremony which is 
more or less complicated. In other words, it must be decided 
who he is. Now it is not a case of choosing a name for him. 
The child who comes into the world is the reincarnation of a 
certain ancestor: he therefore has his name already, and this 
name it is essential to know. Sometimes it may be revealed 
by an external sign, a mark upon the body. E. M. Gordon 
tells us that he has found among the Chamars a practice 
known as Botlagana. Before burying any important member 
of the family they are accustomed to make some sign upon 
the corpse, either with ghee or oil or soot, and when a child is 
born into the family they examine its body to see whether the 
mark reappears. If they find it, they consider the child to be 
the reincarnation of that particular ancestor.! 

More frequently, however, they have recourse to divina- 
tion. The parents send for a witch-doctor or a medicine-man 
or a shaman—in short, for some person capable of discovering 
the mystic participations. On the West Coast of Africa, as 
Ellis tells us, the dead often return to earth and are born 
again into the family to which they belonged in a previous 
existence. A mother will send for a babalowo to tell her 
which ancestor dwells in the newborn babe, a fact he never 
fails to reveal, and when this important matter has been 
settled, he gives advice as to its bringing-up, so that it may 
conform in every way with its proper character, since the 
parents are often taken unawares.2—In New Zealand, ‘when 
the navel-string came off . . . the child was carried to the 


rt E. M. Gordon, “ People of Mungeli Tahsil, Bilaspur District,” Journal 
of Asiatic Society of Bengal, iii. pp. 48-9 (1902). 
2 A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples, pp. 128-9, 152. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 347 


priest. . . . The end of the waka pakoko rakau (idol) was 
placed in the child’s ear, that the mana . . . of the god might 
be transferred to him, and the following karakia was repeated. 
“Wait till I pronounce your name. What is your name ? ’ 
The priest repeated a long list of names, and when the child 
sneezed, that which was then being uttered was the one 
selected.’’ 1—So, too, with the Khonds. ‘‘ Khond births are 
celebrated on the seventh day after the event by a feast given 
to the priest and to the whole village. To determine the best 
name for the child, the priest drops grains of rice into a cup of 
water, naming with each grain a deceased ancestor. From 
_ the movement of the seed in the fluid, and other observations 
made on the person of the infant, he pronounces which of his 
ancestors has reappeared in him, and the child generally, at 
least among the Northern tribes, receives the name of that 
ancestor.” 2 

This name is not the only or the most important one which 
the individual will bear. Among many primitive peoples, at 
each stage of a man’s life he receives a name which is the sign, 
the mystic medium of a new participation set up for him: at 
the time of his initiation, his marriage, his first slaying of an 
enemy, his acquiring a scalp, or securing certain game, his 
entry into a secret society or receiving a higher rank in it, 
and so on. The first name given him, as a rule shortly after 
his birth, is thus merely a kind of mystic registration; it 
marks the beginning of definite existence. Henceforth he will 
have a recognized place in the familial and social group. In 
it he represents a member who has been in complete partici- 
pation with it in the past, and he is qualified to participate in 
it in the same way in the future, when he has undergone the 
necessary ceremony of initiation. 


VI 


During the long period which follows, lasting usually from 
earliest infancy till puberty, or at least until initiation, the 
growing children are left almost entirely to their mothers. 
The men do not worry about their daughters, and take no 


1 R. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 74. 
2 Macpherson, op. cit., pp. 72-3. 


348 HOW NATIVES THINK 


trouble with respect to their sons except to teach them, by 
means of games, that which will later be their actual business : 
the fabrication and the handling of weapons and implements. 
These children, moreover, much loved and not a little spoilt, 
are not yet “ perfect’? members of the social group. They 
are in the period which corresponds with that elapsing between 
the first obsequies and the ceremony which terminates the 
mourning, when the dead is not yet “‘ perfectly ’’ dead, since 
his body, or at least its fleshy part, has not entirely decayed, 
and still adheres to his bones. In the same way, whilst the 
child’s body is growing and developing, he is not definitely 
“born.” His individuality is not yet complete, and many 
characteristic features show that this is clearly understood. 
Among the Ba-Yaka, for instance, ‘even men must observe 
certain restrictions with regard to the eating of fowls; if the 
bird be a hen, it may be shared by several, but a cock must be 
‘eaten by one man alone, or illness results. He may, however, 
give some to his son if not yet circumcised. This fact is 
particularly interesting since it seems to show that a male 
child before circumcision is not supposed to possess an indivi- 
duality apart from the father, although it is regarded as 
belonging to the village of the mother.”’ 1 

For the child to reach the state of “ perfect ’’ man, it is 
not enough to be fully grown, or to have arrived at puberty. 
His corporal maturity is a necessary, but not an all-sufficing 
condition. It is not even the essential one. That which 
matters most, in this as in other cases, governed by the orien- 
tation peculiar to prelogical mentality, is the mystic elements, 
the mysterious practices, rites and ceremonies which will 
enable the young man to participate in the very essence of 
tribe or totem. If he have not passed through this initiation, 
whatever his age may be, he will always be ranked among the 
children. We have many facts in proof of this: here are 
some, borrowed from a collection published by Webster.? 
Fison, speaking of the Fijians, noted that an old Wainimala 
man made no difference between the men who had not been 
initiated and the children, but spoke of them all as koirana 


* Torday and Joyce, ‘‘ Notes on the Ethnography of the Ba-Yaka,”’ 
PP ALT CROC th Ae 
> Primitive Secret Societies, pp. 25 et seq., pp. 205-6. 





PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 349 


(children).:—An old native of West Kimberley told another 
observer that until they had undergone subincision (five years 
after circumcision), boys were like dogs or any other animals.? 
—Howitt bears witness to a significant fact which occurred 
during the ceremony known as kadjawalung, at which he was 
present. At that time in the native camp there were two or 
three men of the Biduelli tribe with their wives and children, 
and also a Krauatun Kurnai man with his wife and child. 
When the ceremony began, they all went away, except one, 
because those tribes had no initiation ceremonies, and there- 
fore the visitors had never been “ made men.” The only one 
who remained was the old Biduelli patriarch, “ and he was 
now driven crouching among the women and children. The 
reason was self-evident he had never been ‘ made a man,’ and 
therefore was no more than a mere boy.” 3—In Savage Island, 
‘a child not so initiated (through mata pulega, a ceremony 
akin to circumcision) is never regarded as a full-born member 
of the tribe.” 4 

This state of minority, which lasts until initiation has 
taken place, is accompanied by many disabilities and dis- 
advantages. In Samoa, until tattooed, a boy was in his 
minority. ‘He could not think of marriage, and he was 
constantly exposed to taunts and ridicule, as being poor and 
of low birth, and as having no right to speak in the society of 
men.’’5 In most Australian tribes, ‘‘ there are various kinds 
of meat which he must not eat; he cannot enter into any 
argument in camp; his opinion on any question is never 
asked, and he never thinks of giving it; he is not expected to 
engage in fights, and he is not expected to fall in love with any 
of the young women. In fact, he is a nonentity; but when 
he has gone through the initiatory process of being made a 
young man, he takes his proper place among the members 
of the tribe.’® In South Africa, ‘at puberty the life 
of an African may be said to begin.” 7 One observer 


1 The Nanga, or Sacred stone enclosures of Wainimala, /.4.1., xiv. p. 18. 
2 Froggart, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, p. 652 

1888). 
; 3 The Native Tribes of South-east Australia, P. 530. 

4 Thomson, “‘ The Natives of Savage Island,” J.A.J., xxxi. p. 140. 

5 Turner, Samoa, p. 88. 

6 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, i. p. 83. 

7 Macdonald, ‘‘ Manners, Customs . . . of South African Tribes,”’ J.4.I., 
xix. p. 268. 


350 HOW NATIVES THINK 


has summed all this up in a very striking passage. ‘“‘ Like 
the dead, the children not arrived at puberty may be 
compared to seed not yet sown. The child not yet adult 
finds himself in the same state as this seed, that is, a state 
of inactivity, of death, but of death with potential life 
within it.’’ ? 

As long as initiation has not taken place, marriage is for- 
bidden. The man who does not yet participate in the mystic 
essence of the social group is incapable of begetting children 
able to participate in it one day. Spencer and Gillen tell us : 
‘Every man without exception throughout the central area, 
in all tribes in which the rite is practised, is subincised . . . 
before he is allowed to take a wife, and infringement of this 
rule would simply mean death to him if found out.’’2 In 
East Africa, ‘no man can marry unless he had entered the 
galo, or if he married, his children would be killed.”’3 As a 
matter of fact, these children, even as adults, could never be 
“full” members of the tribe, their father not having been one 
at the moment of their birth. With certain peoples, however, 
where the initiation ceremonies can only be celebrated at very 
long intervals, this principle has had to be abrogated, and 
married men, fathers of families, have been seen to undergo 
the tests at the same time as quite young men. “ Bonifaz 
gave us as an example his uncle, who was already married, 
but was initiated at the same time as himself, then but eleven — 
years old ; because it was such a long time since the festival © 
had been held.” (The case of such individuals is a very special 
one, and has lasting effects.) ‘‘ A man married under such 
conditions has no right to enter the house of the spirits, nor to 
take part in ceremonies from which women and children are 
excluded. If he has no children as yet, it will be possible to « 
initiate him when the next public ceremony takes place, but 
if he already be the father of a family, he will be taken 
unawares and circumcised, perhaps during a journey. Never- 
theless, since he has not been ‘made a man’ in a public cere- _ 
mony, so that the women might know of it, he can never 

* Passarge, ‘‘ Okawangosumpfland und seine Bewohner,” Zeitschrift für 
Ethnologie, v. p. 706 (1905). 

2 Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 264. 


3 Dale, ‘* Customs of the Natives Inhabiting the Bondei Country,” /.4.1, 
XXV. pp. 188 et seq. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 351 


frequent the house of spirits save by stealth, and without the 
women and children hearing of it.” ! 
The initiation ceremonies, therefore, are designed to 
“perfect ’’ the individual, to render him capable of all the 
functions pertaining to a legitimate member of the tribe, to 
complete him as a living being, as the ceremony ending the 
mourning period renders him “‘ perfectly’”’ dead. It is thus 
that Spencer and Gillen, who have given a most minute 
description of these ceremonies, characterize them. “The 
Engwura . . . is in reality a long series of ceremonies con- 
cerned with the totems, and terminating in what may be best 
described as ordeals by fire, which form the last of the initia- 
tory ceremonies. After the native has passed through these, 
he becomes what is called Urliara, that is, a perfectly developed 
member of the tribe... .”’2 I shall not lay stress upon these 
practices, possibly the best known of all that are habitually 
met with among primitive peoples: numerous instances of 
them will be found in Frazer’s Golden Bough,3 or in Webster’s 
Primitive Secret Societies.4 I shall not enter upon a discussion 
of the theories which have been proposed as an explanation of 
them either. I will confine myself to drawing attention to the 
fact, once again, that the attempt to make such practices 
‘intelligible’ is often likely to prove contradictory. If it 
attains its end it is a failure. In fact, that which is “ intel- 
ligible ’’ to logical thought is very unlikely to coincide with the 
idea of the prelogical mind. Without pretending to “ explain ”’ 
these practices, I have merely tried to show precisely how they, 
as well as so many other customs in use by primitive peoples, 
are related to the collective representations of such peoples, 
and the laws governing these collective representations. 
Now the general idea of such practices is as follows. An 
aim which we should consider a positive one, such as the 
capture of game, the cure of a sick person, is pursued by a 
variety of means in which those of a mystic character largely 
predominate. Hunting is not possible unless a mystic partici- 
pation between hunter and quarry be established, and accord- 
ingly a whole system of practices designed to secure this is 


1 P. W. Schmidt, “ Die geheime RE er der Karesau-Insulaner,” 


Se EPEOPOS, ii. pp. 1032, 1037-8 (19 
The Native Tribes of Central PR #27 
3 Vol. ni. pp. 422 et seq. 4 Pp. 21-58, 





352 HOW NATIVES THINK 


inaugurated. [Illness is due to the action of a spirit and no 
therapeutic methods will have any likelihood of success until 
the “ doctor ” is in communication with this spirit, to subdue 
and expel it, by force if necessary. 

Let us apply this idea to initiation. The novices are 
separated from the women and children with whom they have 
lived until this time. As a rule, the separation occurs sud- 
denly, and often takes them unawares. Confided to the 
superintendence and care of a particular adult, to whom they 
often are definitely related, the novices must submit passively 
to everything imposed upon them and bear pain uncomplain- 
ingly. The tests they undergo are long and difficult, and 
often they are actual tortures: deprivation of sleep, of food, 
being whipped with cords or rods, cudgellings upon the head, 
pulling out the hair and extracting the teeth, branding, 
circumcision, subincision, bleeding, the stings of poisonous 
insects, suffocation by smoke, being suspended by means of 
hooks fastened in their flesh, ordeal by fire, etc. The 
secondary motive of these practices may no doubt be to 
ascertain the novices’ courage and powers of endurance, and 
to test their virility, by seeing whether they are capable of 
bearing pain and of keeping a secret. But the primal aim 
sought after is a mystic effect which in no way depends upon 
their will-power: the important matter is to establish a 
participation between them and the mystic realities which are 
the very essence of the social group, the totems, the mythic or 
human ancestors, and to give them, by means of this parti- 
cipation, a ‘‘ new soul,’ as it has been termed.} Herein we 
perceive difficulties which appear insurmountable to our logical 
thought, since they raise the question of the unity or of the 
multiplicity of the soul, whilst the prelogical mind finds no 
difficulty in imagining that which we call soul as at the same 
time one and multiple. Just as the North American Indian 
hunter, by fasting for a week, establishes between himself and 
the spirit of the bear a mystic bond which will enable him to 
find and kill bears, so do the tests imposed upon the novices 
establish between them and the mystic beings in whom they 
must participate, a relation which is indispensable to the 
spiritual fusion which is desired. It is not the material aspect 
of these tests that is of importance; that, in itself, has as 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 353 


little to do with the case as has the pain of the patient, with 
respect to the success of a surgical operation. The means 
employed by primitives to induce in novices the required 
condition of receptivity are, as a matter of fact, exceed- 
ingly painful, but it is not because they are painful 
that they make use of them, nor would they give them 
up for that reason, either. Their attention is fixed upon 
one single point, and it is the only one that matters: 
this is the condition of special receptivity in which the 
novices must be placed if the desired participation is to 
be realized. 

This condition of receptivity mainly consists in a kind of 
loss of personality, and of consciousness, induced by fatigue, 
pain, feebleness, privations,—in short, in an apparent death 
followed by a new birth. The women and children, (who are 
excluded from these ceremonies, on pain of the direst 
penalties) are made to believe that the novices actually die. 
The novices themselves are induced to believe it, and perhaps 
the older men share this belief, to a certain extent. ‘The 
colour of death is white, and the novices are painted white.’’! 
There are numerous features of this kind and, as Frazer has 
so clearly shown, the testimony respecting it 1s unanimous. 
But if we remember what death and birth mean to the pre- 
logical mind, we shall see that such a mind must imagine thus 
the condition which permits the participation aimed at in the 
initiation of the young men. Death is in no case the pure and 
simple suppression of all the forms of activity and existence 
which constitute life. The primitive has no idea whatever of 
such annihilation. That which we call death is never, in his 
eyes, absolute. The dead live and they die, and even after 
this second death they continue to exist, while awaiting 
another reincarnation. That which we call death is accom- 
plished in successive stages. The first stage, that which the 
initiation tests strive to imitate, is nothing but a change of 
dwelling, a transference of the soul which has momentarily 
abandoned its body, while remaining in the immediate 
vicinity. It is the beginning of the rupture of participation. 
It places the individual in a special state of susceptibility and 
receptivity, akin to the dream-states, catalepsy, or ecstasy 

1 Passarge, op. cit., v. p. 706. 


23 


354 _ HOW NATIVES THINK 


which, in all primitive peoples, are the invariable condition of 
communication with the invisible world. 

Thus by its attachment, in respect to initiation, to prac- 
tices which produce a kind of death (in the primitive’s sense 
of the word) primitive mentality has followed its usual course. 
As ever, it has translated into action and reality its collective 
representations. 


VII 
In most of the primitive peoples we know, there are per- 
sonages who undergo an additional initiation. These are the 
wizards, medicine-men, shamans, doctors, or whatever else 
they may be called. At the period of puberty, they pass 
through the tests imposed upon all young men; and in order 
to become capable of fulfilling the important functions they 


will be called upon to exercise, they have also to undergo a- 


further novitiate, which lasts for months or even years, and is 
carried on under the superintendence of their masters, i.e. 
witch-doctors or shamans in actual practice. Now the resem- 
blance between the initiation rites of witch-doctors or shamans, 
and those of the novices of the tribe in general, is a striking 
one. Still, the general initiation of novices is imposed on all; 
it is comparatively public, (except as far as women and chil- 
dren are concerned); and it necessarily takes place at fairly 
regular intervals. The initiation of witch-doctors, shamans, 
and medicine-men, on the contrary, is reserved for certain 
individuals who have a “ vocation’’; it is surrounded by 
mystery, and only takes place when these persons meet. As 
to the details of the tests, and the effect obtained by them, 
(the apparent death and the new birth), however, analogy 
occasionally becomes identity. ‘‘ When they are being made, 
the candidates are not allowed to have any rest, but are 
obliged to stand or walk about until they are thoroughly 
exhausted and scarcely know what is happening to them. 
They are not allowed to drink a drop of water or taste food of 
any kind. They become, in fact, dazed and stupefied.” 1 
When this condition has reached its height, one may say that 
they are dead. In other words, the spirits (7untarinia) who 


t Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 485. | 


| 


wf 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 355 


| preside at the initiation, kill them and then cause them to be 
born again. ‘“ At break of day, one of the iruntarinia comes 
to the mouth of the cave, and finding the man asleep, throws 
at him an invisible lance which pierces the neck from behind, 
| passes through the tongue, making therein a large hole, and 
| then comes out through the mouth. ...A second lance 
_ thrown by the iruntarinia pierces the head from ear to ear, 
and the victim falls dead and is at once carried into the depths 
_ of the cave ’’—(where the spirits dwell). 
| ‘Within the cave, the truntarinia removes all the internal 
organs and provides the man with a completely new set, ! 
after which operation has been successfully performed, he 
_ presently comes to life again ; but in a condition of insanity.? 
. For several days the man remains more or less strange 
in his appearance and behaviour until one morning it is 
noticed that he has painted with powdered-charcoal and fat a 
broad band across the bridge of his nose. All signs of insanity 
_ have disappeared, and it is at once recognized that a new 
medicine-man has graduated.” 3 
It is the same in South America. ‘The pajé (witch- 
_ doctor) becomes such of his own free will. From his youth up 
he must prepare himself for his sinister rôle. He must with- 
draw to some solitary and inaccessible spot, fast, maintain 
silence, and practise all sorts of deprivations for many years 
he must dance wild and obscene dances until he falls 
exhausted, and he must even, like the young men undergoing 
the initiatory tests, expose himself to the sting of the large 
poisonous ants.’’ 4 
The same rites, resulting in the same apparent death, are 
often the indispensable condition of initiation, not to the 
function of shaman or witch-doctor, but merely to member- 
ship of a secret society the candidate desires to enter. For 
instance, with the Abipones, when a man desires to be raised 
to the status of hocheri, ‘they make a previous trial of his 
fortitude . . . to sit down at home for three days, and 





1 A ceremony identical with that undergone by the tribal novices during 
their apparent death. 

2 Again like the novices. 

3 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 524-5; The Northern Tribes 
of Central Australia, pp. 480-4. 

4 Von Martius, Beitvage zur Ethnographie Stid-Amerika’s, i. p. 558. 


356 HOW NATIVES THINK 


during that time to abstain from speaking, eating and drink- 
ing. . . . On the evening preceding the military function, all 
the women flock to the threshold of his tent. Pulling off their 
clothes from the shoulder to the middle, and dishevelling their 
hair, they stand in a long row (signs of mourning) and lament 
for the ancestors of him who is, next day, to be adorned with 
a military dignity. ... The next day the initiated man directs 
his course towards all the points of the compass in turn, and 
then there is a ceremony in which an old woman shaves off his 
hair, and he receives a new name.’’! He has clearly passed 
through death and a new birth.—Among the Clallams, a 
coast tribe on the mainland opposite the south end of Van- 
couver, ‘the novice of the order’”’ (a secret society) ‘‘ must 
for three days and three nights fast alone in a mysterious lodge 
prepared for him, round which, during all that time, the 
brethren already initiated sing and dance. This period 
elapsed, during which it would seem that the old nature has 
been killed out of him, he is taken up as one dead, and soused 
with the nearest cold water, where he is washed till he revives, 
which thing they call ‘washing the dead.” When his senses 
are sufficiently gathered to him, he is set on his feet ; upon 
which he runs off into the forest, whence he soon reappears a 
perfect medicine-man, rattle in hand and decked out with the 
various trappings of his profession.” 2 Lastly, in the Lower 
Congo territory, we have the Nkimba, “‘ an institution which 
has a wide range among the Lower Congo tribes,” (in which) 
“the initiatory rites are in charge of the mganga, or fetish 
man, who lives with his assistants in an enclosure near each 
village. The candidate for this order, having previously 
imbibed a sleeping potion, swoons in some public assembly 
and is at once surrounded by the nganga and his assistants, 
who take him to the enclosure. It is given out that he is dead, 
and has gone to the spirit world, whence, by the power of the 
great nganga, he will subsequently be restored to life. The 
novice remains with the nganga for a prolonged period, some- 
times for several years, learning a new language, probably an 
archaic Bantu, and receiving instructions in the mysteries of | 
the order. No woman is allowed to look on the face of one of 


t Dobrizhoffer, op. cit., ii. pp. 441-5. 
a Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific Coast of North America, iii. p. 155. 


PRIMITIVES’ IDEA OF DEATH 357 


the Nkimba, who daily parade through the woods, or the 
surrounding country, singing a strange, weird song to warn the 
uninitiated from their approach. When brought back to the 
village, and introduced by his new name, he affects to treat 
everything with surprise as one come to a new life from 
another world ; to recognize no one, not even his father or 
mother, while his relatives receive him as raised from the 
dead ; and for several days the newcomer is permitted to 
take anything he fancies in the village, and is treated with 
every kindness until it is supposed that he has become accus- 
tomed to his surroundings. . . . He then decides whether he 
will become a fetish-man or return to his ordinary life.” 1 

We might quote many similar instances, but these will 
doubtless suffice to demonstrate that the initiatory rites for 
witch-doctors, shamans, medicine-men, fetish-men, etc., or 
members of some secret society, in their general procedure as, 
frequently, in their most insignificant details, reproduce the 
public ceremonies of initiation imposed upon the youths of the 
tribe when they reach puberty. Now there can be no manner 
of doubt as to the end sought by the former : they are designed 
to enable the candidates to participate in mystic realities, to 
put them in communication, or rather, in communion, with 
certain spirits. Does not the power of witch-doctor or shaman 
proceed from the privileges he possesses of entering into 
relation, when he pleases, by means of which he holds the 
secret, with occult forces known only to the ordinary man by 
the effect they produce? There is therefore no doubt, either, 
as to the end aimed at by the practices which constitute the 
usual initiatory rites for the youths of the community. They 
are magic operations designed to place them in a condition of 
ecstasy, unconsciousness, ‘‘ death,” indispensable if they are 
to participate in the essentially mystic reality of their tribe, 
their totem and their ancestors. Once this participation has 
been effected, the novices are ‘‘ full’’ members of the tribe, 
for to them its secrets have been revealed. From this moment, 
these full members, these complete men, are the depositaries 
of all that the social group holds most sacred, and the sense of 
their responsibility never leaves them. A man’s life is, as it 


: Glave, Six Years of Adventure in Congoland, p. 80, quoted in Webster's 
Primitive Secret Societies, pp. 173-4. 


358 HOW NATIVES THINK 


were, “ sharply marked out into two parts . . . first, ordinary 
life, common to all the men and women... second, what 
gradually becomes of greater and greater importance to him, 
the portion of his life devoted to matters of a secret or sacred 
nature. As he grows older he takes an increasing share in 
these, until finally this side of his life occupies by far the 
greater part of his thoughts.” ! At last, death supervenes, 
and the cycle, of which I have essayed to portray the princi- 
pal stages, begins once more. 


* Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Pp. 33 


RAR Ga DV: 


an 
Pers LA 5 


AA 
hag ty : 





CHAPTER IX 


THE TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL 
RY PES 


INTRODUCTION 


ANALYSIS of the facts studied in the preceding chapters seems 
to bear out the essential theses which this books aims at 
establishing : 


(x) The institutions, customs and beliefs of primitives imply 
a mentality which is prelogical and mystic, oriented differently 
from our own. 

(2) The collective representations and interconnections 
which constitute such a mentality are governed by the law 
of participation and in so far they take but little account of 
the logical law of contradiction. 


It is the natural consequence of such a position that I have 
been endeavouring to demonstrate, It is useless to try and 
explain the institutions and customs and beliefs of undeveloped 
peoples by starting from the psychological and intellectual 
analysis of “the human mind” as we know it. No inter- 
pretation will be satisfactory unless it has for its starting-point 
the prelogical and mystic mentality underlying the various 
forms of activity in primitives. | 

But it is not only the study of inferior races that com- 
prehension of this prelogical, mystic mentality helps. Subse- 
quent mental types derive from it, and cannot avoid repro- 
ducing, in forms more or less apparent, some of its features. 
To understand these, therefore, it is necessary to refer back 
to a type which is comparatively ‘‘ primitive.” A vast field 
for positive research into the mental functioning of aggre- 
gates of various kinds, as well as into our own laws of thought, 


362 HOW NATIVES THINK 


is thus laid open to us. In conclusion, I should like to show, 
by referring to certain important points, that this research 
may even now prove fertile of result, if we accept as a working 
hypothesis the idea of prelogical mentality as defined in this 
book. 


I 


In aggregates of the type furthest removed from our 
own, the collective representations which express the mentality 
of the group are not always, strictly speaking, representations. 
What we are accustomed to understand by representation, 
even direct and intuitive, implies duality in unity. The 
object is presented to the subject as in a certain sense distinct 
from himself ; except in states such as ecstasy, that is, border 
states in which representation, properly so called, disappears, 
since the fusion between subject and object has become com- 
plete. Now in analysing the most characteristic of the primi- 
tive’s institutions—such as totemic relationship, the intichiuma 
and initiation ceremonies, etc.—we have found that his mind 
does more than present his object to him: it possesses it and 
is possessed by it. It communes with it and participates in 
it, not only in the ideological, but also in the physical and 
mystic sense of the word. The mind does not imagine it 
merely ; it livesit. In a great many cases the rites and 
ceremonies have the effect of giving reality to a veritable 
symbiosis, that between the totemic group and its totem, 
for instance. At this stage, therefore, rather than speak of 
collective representations, it would be wiser to call them 
collective mental states of extreme emotional intensity, in 
which representation is as yet undifferentiated from the move- 
ments and actions which make the communion towards which ~ 
it tends a reality to the group. Their participation in it is so 
effectually dived that it is not yet properly imagined. 

We shall not be astonished, therefore, that Spencer and 
Gillen should have discovered in the Australian aborigines 
they studied ‘ not the slightest trace of anything that might 
be described as ancestor-worship”’ . . .ï very few traditions 
about the origin of animals; few myths; and no objects of 
worship, properly so called; no personification of natural 

1 The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, P. 494. 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 363 


forces or of animal or vegetable species.t Similar paucity in 
this respect has been noted by Ehrenreich 2 in the most primitive 
races of South America—peoples who are unfortunately far 
less known to us than those of Australia. This fact demon- 
strates that the prelogical and mystic collective mentality is 
still actively predominant in the social group. The feeling 
of symbiosis effected between the individuals of the group, or 
between a certain human group and one which is animal or 
vegetable in substance, is directly expressed by institutions 
and ceremonies. At the moment it needs no symbols other 
than those used in the ceremonies. Such are the churinga, 
the decorations and ornaments with which the actors in the 
ceremonies adorn themselves, the dances, masks, gestures and 
traditions relating to the ancestors of the Alcheringa, among 
Australian aborigines ; or again, among the Indians of Brazil 
(the Bororo, Bakairi, and others), the entire group of customs 
known as couvade, in which a participation, both mystic and 
physical, between parents and child is so evidently felt and 
realized. 

This form of mental activity, which differs so notably from 
the forms which our own aggregates afford us the opportunity 
of studying, is not yet seeking to understand or explain its 
object. It is oriented in quite another direction; it cannot 
be dissociated from the mystic practices which give effect 
to its participations. The ubiquity or multipresence of exist- 
ing beings, the identity of one with many, of the same and of 
another, of the individual and the species—in short, every- 
thing that would scandalize and reduce to despair thought 
which is subject to the law of contradiction, is implicitly 
admitted by this prelogical mentality. It is, moreover, im- 
permeable to what we call experience, i.e. to the lessons which 
may be learnt by observation of the objective relations between 
phenomena. It has its own experience, one which is wholly 
mystic, much more complete and exhaustive and decisive 
than the ofttimes ambiguous experience, the censorship of 
which thought, properly so called, knows that she must accept. 
It is entirely satisfied with this. 

In this respect there is nothing more significant than the 


The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 442. 
Die Mythen und Legenden der Süd-Amerthanischen Urvôlker, pp. 12, 15. 


364 HOW NATIVES THINK 


primitive classifications I have already cited, to which Durk- 
heim and Mauss have drawn attention, for in the primitive 
mentality these, to a certain extent, occupy the position 
held by the categories in logical thought. The participations 
felt by the members of the social body and expressed in their 
divisions and groupings, are extended to all the entities which 
such a mentality imagines. Animal and vegetable orders, 
the heavenly bodies, inorganic matter, directions in space, 
are all fitted into some division or other of the social frame- 
work. To give but one example only: “ In this tribe,” says 
Howitt, ‘‘ the two main classes and the four sub-classes divide, 
so to speak, the whole universe into groups. The two main 
classes are Mallera or Wuthera ; consequently all other objects 
are Mallera or Wuthera. This custom is carried to such an 
extreme that a medicine-man who is a Mallera, for instance, 
in his magical operations, can only use things which belong 
to his own class. Moreover, when he dies, the bier on which 
his body rests must perforce be made of the wood of a tree of 
the Mallera class.” 2 

À certain community of being is thus immediately felt, 
not only between members of the same totemic family, but 
between all entities of any kind whatsoever which form part 
of the same class and are linked together in mystic fellowship. 
And this feeling, which environs a representation still undiffen- 
tiated, is necessarily accompanied by the feeling (and the 
undifferentiated representation) of a non-participation with 
beings and objects belonging to other classes. To a mentality 
of this kind, the feeling of not being bound by any mystic 
relation to another being in the vicinity, is not merely a nega- 
‘tive sentiment: in certain cases it may be a very definite 
and positive feeling. We may reconstruct it, to a certain 
extent, by conjuring up what is now called racial antagonism, 
and the sentiments which that which is “ foreign’? may 
arouse, even among civilized people. From the standpoint 
of action, therefore, there arises a need to resort to certain 
individuals or to the members of a certain group, who alone 
possess the mystic qualifications enabling them to carry 
out a ceremony or execute a dance or a rite, or merely to be 


1 Vide Chap. III. p. 128. 
* Howitt, “ Notes on Australian Message Sticks,” J.4.I., xviii. p. 326. 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 365 


present at it. The result to be obtained depends above all 
upon the mystic participations between the classes of beings 
and of objects. 


II 


In his recent work on Animism in the Indian Archipelago, 
Kruijt believes it necessary to distinguish two successive 
stages in the evolution of primitive communities: one in 
which individual spirits are reputed to inform and inspire 
every being and every object (animals, plants, boulders, stars, 
weapons, tools, and so forth), and another and earlier one, in 
which individualization has not as yet taken place, in which 
there is a diffused principle capable of penetrating everywhere, 
a kind of universal and widespread force which seems to 
animate persons and things, to act in them and endow them 
with life.t Here we recognize Marett’s “‘ pre-animistic”’ stage, 
upon which Durkheim and Mauss have also insisted. Kruijt 
adds—and this remark of his has a very important bearing 
upon the subject with which we are concerned—that the 
differentiation of these two periods corresponds with a differ- 
ence in the mentality of the social group. At the time when 
souls and spirits are not yet individualized, the individual 
consciousness of every member of the group is and remains 
strictly solidary with the collective consciousness. It does 
not distinctly break away from it ; it does not even contradict 
itself in uniting with it; that which does dominate it is the 
uninterrupted feeling of participation. Only later, when the 
human individual becomes clearly conscious of himself as an 
individual, when he explicitly differentiates himself from the 
group of which he feels himself a member, do beings and objects 
outside himself also begin to appear to him as provided with 
individual minds or spirits during this life and after death. 

Thus, when the relations between the social group and the 
individuals composing it are evolved, the collective repre- 
sentations, the group ideas, are modified at the same time. In 
its purest form primitive mentality implied a participation 
which was felt and lived, both by individuals with the social 
group, and by the social group with the surrounding ones. 


t Kruijt, Het Animisme in den Indischen Archipel, pp. 66-7 (1906). 
2 Ibid., pp. 2-5. 


366 | HOW NATIVES THINK 


Both these participations are solidary, and the modifications 
of the one reflect accordingly upon the other. In proportion 
as the individual consciousness of each member of the group 
tends to declare itself, the feeling of a mystic symbiosis of the 
social group with surrounding groups of beings and objects 
becomes less intimate and direct and less constant. Here as 
there bonds which are more or less explicit tend to take the 
place of the feeling of direct communion. In a word, parti- 
cipation tends to become ideological. For instance, as soon 
as individual consciousness begins to grasp itself as such and 
consequently to distinguish individuals as such in the sur- 
rounding groups of beings, these ideas also define, more or 
less distinctly, that of the groups as such, and as a further 
consequence, an idea of the mystic relations uniting the indi- 
viduals of a group, and the different groups in their turn. The 
communion which is no longer actually lived, the need for which 
still appears just as pressing, will be obtained by means of. 
intermediaries. The Bororo tribe will no longer declare that 
they ave araras. They will say that their ancestors were 
araras, that they are of the same substance as the araras, that 
they will become araras after death, that it is forbidden to 
kill and eat araras, except under conditions which are rigidly 
defined, such as totemic sacrifice, etc. 

Following on the paucity I recently noted in the Aruntas, 
the Bororo and other aggregates of a very primitive type, we 
shall find, in those more advanced, such as the Huichols, the 
Zuñis of New Mexico, the Maoris of New Zealand, an in- 
creasing wealth of collective representations properly so 
called, and of symbols. In the former the feeling of mystic 
symbiosis is still intense and permanent. To express itself it 
need but resort to the very organization of the social group 
and the ceremonies which assure its prosperity and the rela- 
tions with surrounding groups. In the latter, the need of 
participation is perhaps no less active. But as this participa- 
tion is no longer directly felt by every member of the social 
group, it is obtained by means of an ever-increasing display 
of religious or magic practices, of sacred and divine beings and 
objects, by rites performed by priests and members of secret 
societies, by myths, etc. F. H. Cushing’s admirable work on 
the Zuñis, for instance, shows us how a prelogical and mystic 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 367 


mentality of an already exalted type expands into a magni- 
ficent efflorescence of collective representations destined to 
express, or even to produce, pateicipaons which are no pes 
directly felt. 

The “vehicles ” of these participations are very diverse in 
their nature. In many communities we find, concurrent with 
representations similar to those of the Melanesian mana,' col- 
lective representations of more or less individualized spirits, of 
souls more or less distinctly conceived, mythical beings with 
an animal or human or semi-human form, heroes, genii, gods. 
The observers find names for them easily enough. But the 
difficulty is not to allow ourselves to be deceived by these 
names, but to reconstruct under them the mystic and pre- 
logical collective representations which no longer exist for us. 

This difficulty never appears so great as when it is a question 
of defining the “‘religion’’ of the most primitive peoples we 
are acquainted with. For we might say equally well that the 
mentality which expresses itself in their collective representa- 
tions is wholly religious, or, in another sense of the word, that 
it is hardly at all so. In so far as a mystic communion with, 
and actual participation in, the object of the religious senti- 
ment and ritual practice is of the very essence of religion, 
primitive mentality must be declared religious because it does 
realize a communion of such a nature, and indeed to the highest 
degree it is possible to imagine. But in other respects it does 
not seem correct to speak of it as “‘ religious,’’ at least to this 
extent, that by reason of the direct character of this parti- 
cipation it does not recognize as an ideal outside and above 
itself the beings with whom it feels itself united in mystic and 
intimate communion. We may recall the definite statements 
made by Spencer and Gillen on this point, 

As a matter of fact, the primitives’ “ religious ’’ ideas are a 
constant source of error and confusion to us. Our own way 
of thinking makes us imagine the objects of their thought in 
the attitude of divine beings or objects, and that it is by virtue 
of this divine character of theirs that homage, sacrifice, prayer, 
adoration and all actual religious belief is directed towards 
them. But to the primitive mind, on the contrary, these 


1 Cf. Hubert and Mauss, “ Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions,” Année 
Soctologique, pp. xx et seq. 


368 HOW NATIVES THINK 


objects and these beings become divine only when the parti- 
cipation they guarantee has ceased to be direct. The Arunta 
who feels that he is both himself and the ancestor whose 
churinga was entrusted to him at the time of his initiation, 
knows nothing of ancestor-worship. The Bororo does not 
make the parrots, which are Bororo, the objects of a religious 
cult. It is only in aggregates of a more advanced type that 
we find an ancestor-worship, a cult of heroes, gods, sacred 
animals, etc. The ideas which we call really religious are 
thus a kind of differentiated product resulting from a prior 
form of mental activity. The participation or communion 
first realized by mystic symbiosis and by the practices which 
affirmed it is obtained later by union with the object of the 
worship and belief called religious, with the ancestor, the 
god. The personality of these objects comprises, as we know, 
an infinite variety of grades, from mystic forces of which we 
cannot say whether they are single or manifold, to divinities 
clearly defined by physical and moral attributes, such as those 
of the Melanesian or the Greek deities. It depends above all on 
the degree of development attained by the group studied, i.e., 
upon the type of its institutions as well as its mental type. 


Ii] 


When we consider myths in their relation to the mentality 
of the social groups in which they originate, we are led to 
similar conclusions. Where the participation of the indi- 
vidual in the social group is still directly felt, where the parti- 
cipation of the group with surrounding groups is actually 
lived—that is, as long as the period of mystic symbiosis lasts— 
myths are meagre in number and of poor quality. This is 
the case with the Australian aborigines and the Indians of 
Northern and Central Brazil, etc. Where the aggregates are 
of a more advanced type, as, for instance, the Zuñis, Iroquois, 
Melanesians, and others, there is, on the contrary, an in- 
creasingly luxuriant outgrowth of mythology. Can myths 
then likewise be the products of primitive mentality which 
appear when this mentality is endeavouring to realize a parti- 
cipation no longer directly felt—when it has recourse to inter- 
mediaries, and vehicles designed to secure a communion which ~ 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 369 


has ceased to be a living reality ? Such a hypothesis may seem 
to be a bold one, but we view myths with other eyes than 
those of the human beings whose mentality they reflect. We 
see in them that which they do not perceive, and that which 
they imagine there we no longer realize. For example, when 
we read a Maori or Zufii or any other myth, we read it trans- 
lated into our own language, and this very translation is a 
betrayal. To say nothing of the construction of the sentences, 
which is bound to be affected by our customary habits of 
thought, if only in the very order of the words, to primitives 
the words themselves have an atmosphere which is wholly 
mystic, whilst in our minds they chiefly evoke associations 
having their origin in experience. We speak, as we think, 
by means of concepts. Words, especially those expressive 
of group-ideas, portrayed in myths, are to the primitive mystic 
realities, each of which determines a champ de force. From 
the emotional point of view, the mere listening to the myth 
is to them something quite different from what it is to us. 
What they hear in it awakens a whole gamut of harmonics 
which do not exist for us. 

Moreover, in a myth of which we take note, that which 
mainly interests us, that which we seek to understand and 
interpret, is the actual tenor of the recital, the linking-up of 
facts, the occurrence of episodes, the thread of the story, the 
adventures of the hero or mythical animal, and so forth. 
Hence the theories, momentarily regarded as classic, which 
see in myths a symbolic presentment of certain natural pheno- 
_ mena, or else the result of a “ disease of language ”” ; hence the 
classifications (like that of Andrew Lang, for instance) which 
arrange myths in categories according to their content. 
But this is overlooking the fact that the prelogical, mystic 
mentality is oriented differently from our own. It is un- 
_ doubtedly not indifferent to the doings and adventures and 
vicissitudes related in myths; it is even certain that these 
interest and intrigue the primitive’s mind. But it is not the 
positive content of the myth that primarily appeals to him. 
He does not consider it as a thing apart ; he undoubtedly sees 
it no more than we see the bony framework beneath the flesh 
of a living animal, although we know very well that it is there. 

1 Encylopedia Britannica. Mythology (9th ed.), xvii. pp. 156-7. 
24 


370 HOW NATIVES THINK 


That which appeals to him, arouses his attention and evokes 
his emotion, is the mystic element which surrounds the positive 
content of the story. This element alone gives myth and 
legend their value and social importance and, I might almost 
add, their power. 

It is not easy to make such a trait felt nowadays, precisely 
because these mystic elements have disappeared as far as we 
are concerned, and what we call a myth is but the inanimate 
corpse which remains after the vital spark has fled. Yet if 
the perception of beings and objects in nature is wholly mystic 
to the mind of the primitive, would not the presentation of 
these same beings and objects in myths be so likewise? Is 
not the orientation in both cases necessarily the same? To 
make use of a comparison, though but an imperfect one, let 
us hark back to the time when in Europe, some centuries ago, 
the only history taught was sacred history. Whence came 
the supreme value and importance of that history, both to 
those who taught and those who learnt ? Did it le in the 


actual facts, in the knowledge of the sequence of judges, kings © 


or prophets, of the misfortunes of the Israelites during their 
strife with the neighbouring tribes? Most certainly not. It 


is not from the historical, but from the sacred, point of view 


that the Biblical narrative was of incomparable interest. It 


is because the true God, perpetually intervening in the story, : 
makes His presence manifest at all times and, to the Christian — 


idea, causes the coming of His Son to be anticipated. In short, 


it is the mystic atmosphere which surrounds the facts and . 


prevents them from being ordinary battles, massacres or 
revolutions. Finally it is because Christendom finds in it a 
witness, itself divine, of its communion with its God. 

Myths are, in due proportion, the Biblical narrative of 
primitive peoples. The preponderance of mystic elements, 
however, in the group ideas of myths, is even greater than in 
our sacred history. At the same time, since the law of parti- 
cipation still predominates in the primitive mind, the myth 
is accompanied by a very intense feeling of communion with 
the mystic reality it interprets. When the adventures, 
exploits, noble deeds, death and resurrection of a beneficent 
and civilizing hero are recounted in a myth, for instance, it 
is not the fact of his having given his tribe the idea of making 


. 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 371 


a fire or of cultivating mealies that of itself interests and espe- 
cially appeals to the listeners. It is here as in the Biblical 
narrative, the participation of the social group in its own past, 
it is the feeling that the group is, as it were, actually living in 
that epoch, that there is a kind of mystic communion with 
that which has made it what it is. In short, to the mind of 
the primitive, myths are both an expression of the solidarity 
of the social group with itself in its own epoch and in the past 
and with the groups of beings surrounding it, and a means 
of maintaining and reviving this feeling of solidarity. 

Such considerations, it may be urged, might apply to 
myths in which the human or semi-human ancestors of the 
social group, its civilizing or its protecting heroes, figure ; but 
are they valid in the case of myths relating to sun, moon, 
stars, thunder, the sea, the rivers, winds, cardinal points, 
etc.? It is only to an intellect such as ours that the objection 
appears a serious one. The primitive’s mind works along 
the lines that are peculiar to it. The mystic elements in his 
ideas matter considerably more to him than the objective 
features which, in our view, determine and classify beings of 
all kinds, and as a consequence the classifications which we 
regard as most clearly evident escape his attention. Others, 
which to us are inconceivable, however, claim it. Thus the 
relationship and communion of the social group with a certain 
animal or vegetable species, with natural phenomena like 
the wind or the rain, with a constellation, appear quite as 
simple to him as his communion with an ancestor or a legendary 
hero. To give but one instance, the aborigines studied by 
Spencer and Gillen regard the sun as a Panunga woman, 
belonging to a definite sub-class, and consequently bound 
by the ties of relationship to all the other clans of the 
tribe. Let us refer again to the analogy indicated above. In 
he sacred history of primitives natural history forms a part. 

If this view of the chief significance of myths and of their 
characteristic function in aggregates of a certain mental type 
be correct, several consequences of some importance will 
ensue. This view does not render the careful and detailed 
study of myths superfluous. It provides neither a theory 
for classifying them in genera and species, nor an exact method 
of interpreting them, nor does it throw positive light upon 









372 HOW NATIVES THINK 


their relations with religious observances. But it does enable 
us to avoid certain definite errors, and at any rate it permits 
of our stating the problem in terms which do not falsify the 
solution beforehand. It provides a general method of pro- 
cedure, and this is to mistrust “‘ explanatory ’’ hypotheses 
which would account for the genesis of myths by a psychological 
and intellectual activity similar to our own, even while assuming 
it to be childish and unreflecting. 

The myths which have long been considered the easiest 
to explain, for instance, those regarded as absolutely lucid, such 
as the Indian nature-myths, are on the contrary the most 
intriguing. As long as one could see in them the spontaneous 
product of a naive imagination impressed by the great natural 
phenomena, the interpretation of them was in fact self-evident. 
But if we have once granted that the mentality which generates 
myths is differently oriented from ours, and that its col- 
lective representations obey their own laws, the chief of which 
is the law of participation, the very intelligibility of these 
myths propounds a fresh problem. We are led to believe 
that, far from being primitive, these myths, in the form in 
which they have reached us, are something absolutely arti- 
ficial, that they have been very highly and consciously elabo- 
rated, and this to such an extent that their original form is 
almost entirely lost. On the other hand, the myths which 
may possibly seem the easiest to explain are those which 
most directly express the sense of the social group’s relation- 
ship, whether it be with its legendary members and those no 
longer living, or with the groups of beings which surround it. 
For such myths appear to be the most primitive in the sense 
that they are most readily allied with the peculiar prelogical, 
mystic mentality of the least civilized aggregates. Such, 
among others, are the totemic myths. 

If, however, the aggregates belong to a type even slightly 
more advanced, the interpretation of their myths very soon 
becomes risky and perhaps impossible. In the first place, 
their increasing complexity diminishes our chances of correctly 
following up the successive operations of the mentality which 
produces these myths. This mentality not only refuses to be 
bound by the law of contradiction—a feature which most 
myths reveal at first sight, so to speak—but it neither abstracts 








TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 373 


nor associates, and accordingly it does not symbolize as our 
thought does. Our most ingenious conjectures, therefore, 
always risk going astray. 

If Cushing had not obtained the interpretation of their 
myths from the Zuñis themselves, would any modern intellect 
have ever succeeded in finding a clue to this prehistoric laby- 
rinth? The true exposition of myths which are somewhat 
complicated involves a reconstruction of the mentality which 
has produced them. This is a result which our habits of 
thought would scarcely allow us to hope for, unless, like 
Cushing, a savant were exceptionally capable of creating a 
‘primitive ’’ mentality for himself, and of faithfully trans- 
cribing the confidences of his adopted compatriots. 

Moreover, even in the most favourable conditions, the 
state in which the myths are when we collect them may suffice 
to render them unintelligible and make any coherent inter- 
pretation impossible. Very frequently we have no means of 
knowing how far back they date. If they are not a recent 
product, who is our authority for assuming that some frag- 
ments at any rate have not disappeared, or, on the other 
hand, may not myths which were originally quite distinct, 
have been mingled in one incongruous whole? The mystic 
elements which were the predominant feature at the time when 
the myth originated may have lost some of their importance if 
the mentality of the social group has evolved at the same time 
as their institutions and their relations with neighbouring 
groups. May not the myth which has gradually come to be a 
mystery to this altered mentality have been mutilated, added 
to, transformed, to bring it into line with the new collective 
representations which dominate the group? May not this 
adaptation have been performed in a contrary sense, without 
regard to the participations which the myth originally ex- 
pressed ? Let us assume—an assumption by no means un- 
reasonable—that it has undergone several successive trans- 
formations of this kind: by what analysis can we hope ever 
to retrace the evolution which has been accomplished, to 
find once more the elements which have disappeared, to 
correct the misconceptions grafted upon one another? The 
same problem occurs with respect to rites and customs which 
are often perpetuated throughout the ages, even while they 


374 HOW NATIVES THINK 


are being distorted, completed in a contrary sense, or 
acquiring a new significance to replace that which is no longer 
understood. 


IV 


When the participations which matter most to the social . 


group are secured by means of intermediaries or ‘‘ vehicles,’ 
instead of being felt and realized in more direct fashion, the 
change reacts upon the mentality of the group itself. If, for 
instance, a certain family or a certain person, a chief, a medicine- 


man in any tribe is represented as “‘ presiding ” over the — 


sequence of the seasons, the regularity of the rainfall, the 


conservation of species which are advantageous—in short, — 
the periodic recurrence of the phenomena upon which the 1 
existence of the tribe depends—the group-idea will be pecu- — 


liarly mystic, and it will preserve the characteristic features 
proper to prelogical mentality to a very high degree. Partici- 
pation, concentrated, as it were, upon the beings who are its 
media, its chosen vessels, thus itself becomes ideological. 
By force of contrast, other families, other individuals of the 
social group, the neighbouring groups not interested in this 
participation, are represented in a more indifferent and im- 
partial way, a fashion less mystic and therefore more objective. 
This means that a more and more definite and permanent 
distinction tends to be established between sacred beings 
and objects on the one hand, and profane beings and objects 
on the other. The former, inasmuch as they are the necessary 
vehicles of participation, are essentially and eternally sacred. 
The latter only become so intermittently by virtue of their 


communion with the former, and in the intervening periods — 


they present no more than faint, derivative mystic features. 
This leads to two connected consequences. In the first 


place, since the beings and the objects among which the social _ 


group lives are no longer felt to be in direct communion with ) 
it, the original classifications by which this communion was 4 


expressed tend to become obliterated, and there is a redistri- 


bution of less mystic nature, founded upon something other … 


than the ramifications of the social group. Ideas of animal 


and plant life, the stars, etc., are doubtless still impregnated . 


with mystic elements, but not all of them to the same extent. 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 375 


Some of them are markedly so, others to a far lesser degree, 
and this difference brings about fresh classifications. The 
beings and the objects represented as ‘‘ containers ’’ of mystic 
virtue, the vehicles of participation, are inevitably differentiated 
from those which do not possess this supreme interest for the 
social group. The latter are beginning to be ranged according 
to an interest of another order; their distinguishing features 
are less mystic, but more objective. In other words, the 
collective representations of these beings and objects is begin- 
ning to tend towards that which we call “concept.” It is 
still remote from this, but the process which is to bring it nearer 
has already begun. $ 

Moreover, the perception of these entities at the same time 
loses some of its mystic character. The attributes we term 
objective, by which we define and classify entities of all kinds, 
are to the primitive enveloped in a complex of other elements 
much more important, elements exacting almost exclusive 
attention, at any rate to the extent allowed by the necessities 
of life. But if this complex becomes simpler and the mystic 
elements lose their predominance, the objective attributes 
ipso facto readily attract and retain the attention. The part 
played by perception proper is increased to the extent in 
which that of the mystic collective representations diminishes. 
Such a modification is favourable to the change of classifica- 
tion of which we have spoken, and in its turn this change 
reacts upon the method of perceiving, as an inducted stream 
reacts upon the main current. 

Thus, as by degrees the participations are less directly 
felt, the collective representations more nearly approach that 
which we properly call “‘idea’’—that is, the intellectual, 
cognitive factor occupies more and more space in it. It 
tends to free itself from the affective and motor elements in 
which it was at first enveloped, and thus arrives at differen- 
tiating itself. Primitive mentality, as a consequence, is again 
modified in another respect. In aggregates in which it is 
least impaired, in which its predominance is at its maximum, 
we have found it impervious to experience. The potency of 
the collective representations and their interconnections is 
such that the most direct evidence of the senses cannot counter- 
act it, whilst the interdependence of the most extraordinary 


fay NAD Cpe 


376 HOW NATIVES THINK 


kind between phenomena is a matter of unwavering faith. 
But when perception becomes less mystic, and the precon- 
nections no longer impose the same sovereign authority, sur- 
rounding nature is seen with less prejudiced eyes and the 
collective representations which are evolving begin to feel 
the effect of experience. Not all at the same time, nor to the 
same extent: on the contrary, it is certain that these are 
unequally modified, in accordance with a good many diverse 
circumstances, and especially with the degree of interest 
felt by the social group in the object. It is on the points in 
which participation has become weakest that the mystic 
preconnections most quickly yield, and the objective relations 
first rise to the surface. 

At the time when the mentality of primitive peoples grows 
more accessible to experience, it becomes, too, more alive to 
the law of contradiction. Formerly this was almost entirely 
a matter of indifference, and the primitive’s mind, oriented — 
according to the law of participation, perceived no difficulty 
at all in statements which to us are absolutely contradictory. 
A person is himself and at the same time another being; he 
is in one place and he is also somewhere else : he is individual 
as well as collective (as when the individual identifies himself 
with his group), and so on. The prelogical mind found such 
statements quite satisfactory, because it did more than 
perceive and understand them to be true. By virtue of that 
which I have called a mystic symbiosis, it felt, and lived, the 
truth of them. When, however, the intensity of this feeling 
in the collective representations diminishes, the logical diffi- 
culty in its turn begins to make its presence felt: Then by 
degrees the intermediaries, the vehicles of participation, 
appear. They render it representable by the most varied 
methods—transmission, contact, transference of mystic qual- 
ities—they secure that communion of substance and of life 
which was formerly sensed in a direct way, but which runs the 
risk of appearing unintelligible as soon as it is no longer lived. 

Properly speaking, the absurdities to which the primitive 
mind remains insensible are of two kinds, undoubtedly closely 
connected with each other, but yet appearing very different 
to our way of thinking. Some, like those we have just in- 
stanced, arise out of what seems to us an infringement of the — 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 377 


logical law of contradiction. These manifest themselves 
gradually, as the participations formerly felt are “‘ precipi- 
tated ’’ in the form of definite statements. Whilst the feeling 
of participation remains a lively one, language conceals these 
absurdities, but it betrays them when the feeling loses some 
of its intensity. Others have their source in the preconnec- 
tions which the collective representations establish between 
persons, things, occurrences. But these preconnections are only 
absurd through their incompatibility with the definitely fixed 
terms for these persons, things, occurrences—terms which 
the prelogical mind has not at its command in the beginning. 
It is only when such a mind has grown more cognizant of the 
lessons taught by experience, when the attributes we term 
‘ objective ” get the better of the mystic elements in the col- 
lective representations, that an interdependent relation between 
occurrences or entities can be rejected as impossible or absurd. 

In the earlier stage the dictum deduced from Hume's 
argument, that ‘anything may produce anything,’ might 
have served as a motto for primitive mentality. There is 
no metamorphosis, no generating cause, no remote influence 
too strange or inconceivable for such a mentality to accept. 
A human being may be born of a boulder, stones may speak, 
fire possess no power to burn, and the dead may be alive. We 
should refuse to believe that a woman may be delivered of a 
snake or a crocodile, for the idea would be irreconcilable with 
the laws of nature which govern the birth even of monstrosities. 
But the primitive mind, which believes in a close connection 
between a human social group and a snake or crocodile social 
group would find no more difficulty in this than in conceiving 
of the identity of the larva with the insect, or the chrysalis 
with the butterfly. Moreover, it is just as incompatible 
with ‘the laws of nature ”” that.a corpse, whose tissues have 
become chemically incapable of sustaining life, should arise 
again ; nevertheless, there are millions of cultivated persons 
who believe implicitly in the resurrection of Lazarus. It is 
enough that their representation of the Son of God involves 
His having the power to effect miracles. To the primitive 
mind, however, everything is a miracle, or rather, nothing is; 
and therefore everything is credible, and there is nothing 
either impossible or absurd. 


378 HOW NATIVES THINK 


As a matter of fact, however—and in this sense the dictum 
is only partially applicable to the prelogical mind—the pre- 
connections involved in its collective representations are not 
as arbitrary as they appear. While indifferent to that which 
we call the real and objective relations between entities and 
manifestations, they express others much more important 
to such a mind, to wit, the mystic participating relations. It 
is these relations, and no others, which are realized in the 
preconnections, for these are the only ones about which the 
primitive mind troubles. Suggest to a primitive that there 
are other relations, imaginary or actual, between persons, 
things and occurrences: he will set them aside and reject 
them as untrue or insignificant or absurd. He will pay no 
attention to them, because he has his own experience to guide 
him, a mystic experience against which, as long as it con- 
tinues to exist, actual experience is powerless. It is not only 
therefore because, in itself and in the abstract, any relation 
whatever between entities and occurrences is just as acceptable © 
as any other; it is above all because the law of participation 
admits of mystic preconnections that the mind of the primitive 
seems undeterred by any physical impossibility. 

But, granted that in a certain community the mentality 
evolves at the same rate as the institutions, that these pre- 
connections grow weaker and cease to obtrude themselves— 
other relations between persons and things will be perceived, 
representations will tend to take on the form of general, 
abstract concepts, and at the same time a feeling, an idea of 
that which is physically possible or impossible will become 
more definite. It is the same then with a physical as with a 
logical absurdity, for the same causes render the prelogical 
mind insensible to both. Therefore the same changes and the 
same process of evolution cause it to be alive to the impossi- 
bility of affirming two contradictory statements at the same 
time, and the impossibility of believing in relations which are 
incompatible with experience. 

Such a concomitance cannot be merely adventitious. In 
both cases the impossibility is felt only in a condition common 
to both: it is necessary, and it is enough, that the collective 
representations tend towards conceptual form. On the one 
hand, in fact, participations expressed in such a form can 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 379 


only be preserved, as we have already seen, by transforming 
themselves in order to avoid contradiction. And, on the other 
hand, it is when sufficiently definite concepts of beings and 
objects have been formed that the absurdity of certain mystic 
preconnections is first felt to obtrude. When the essential 
features of stone are, as it were, registered and fixed in the 
concept “stone,” which itself forms one among other concepts 
of natural objects differing from stone by properties no less 
definite and constant than its own, it becomes inconceivable 
that stones should speak or boulders move of their own accord 
or procreate human beings, etc. The more the concepts 
are determined, fixed and arranged in classes, the more con- 
tradictory do the statements which take no account of such 
relations appear. Thus the logical demand made by the 
intellect grows with the definition and determination of con- 
cepts, and it is an essential condition of such definition and 
determination that the mystic preconnections of the collective 
representations become impaired. It grows then simul- 
taneously with the knowledge acquired by experience. The 
progress of the one helps the other and vice versa, and we 
cannot say which is cause and which effect. 


V 


The process which is going on does not necessarily present 
itself as progressive, however. In the course of their evolu- 
tion concepts do not submit to a kind of “ finalité interne ” 
which directs them for the best. The weakening of the mystic 
preconnections and elements is not inevitable nor always 
continuous. The mentality of primitive peoples, even whilst 
becoming less impervious to the teaching of experience, long 
remains prelogical, and most of its ideas preserve a mystic 
imprint. Moreover, there is nothing to prevent abstract and 
general concepts, once formed, retaining elements which are 
still recognizable as vestiges of an earlier stage. Precon- 
nections, which experience has been unable to dissolve, still 
remain; mystic properties are yet inherent in beings and 
objects. Even in aggregates of the most advanced type, a 
concept which is free of all admixture of this kind is exceptional, 
and it is therefore scarcely to be met with in any others. The 


380 HOW NATIVES THINK 


concept is a sort of logical “ precipitate’ of the collective 
representations which have preceded it, and this precipitate 
nearly always brings with it more or less of a residuum of 
mystic elements. 

How can it be otherwise? Even in social aggregates of a 
fairly low type abstract concepts are being formed, and while 
not in all respects comparable with our own, they are never- 
theless concepts. Must they not follow the general direction 
of the mentality which gives rise to them? They too, then, 
are prelogical and mystic, and it is only by very slow degrees 
that they cease to beso. It may even happen that after having 
been an aid to progress, they constitute an obstacle. Forif the 
determination of the concept provides the rational activity of 
the mind with a lever which it did not find in collective repre- 
sentations subject to the law of participation; if the mind 
inures itself to reject as impossible statements which are 
incompatible with the definition of the concepts, it very often 
pays dearly for the privilege when it grows used to regarding, 
as adequate to reality, conceptual ideas and relations which 
are very far removed from it. If progress is not to find itself 
arrested, concepts of entities of all kinds must remain plastic 
and be continually modified, enlarged, confined within fixed 
limits, transformed, disintegrated and reunited by the teaching 
of experience. If these concepts crystallize and become fixed, 
forming themselves into a system which claims to be self- 
sufficing, the mental activity applied to them will exert itself 
indefinitely without any contact with the reality they claim 
to represent. They will become the subject of fantastical 
and frivolous argument, and the starting-point of exaggerated 
infatuation. 

Chinese scientific knowledge affords a striking example of 
this arrested development. It has produced immense encyclo- 
pædias of astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology, pathology, 
therapeutics and the like, and to our minds all this is nothing 
but balderdash. How can so much effort and skill have 
been expended in the long course of ages, and their product 
be absolutely nil? This is due to a variety of causes, no 
doubt, but above all to the fact that the foundation of each 
of these so-called sciences rests upon crystallized concepts, 
concepts which have never really been submitted to the test 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 381 


of experience, and which contain scarcely anything beyond 
vague and unverifiable notions with mystic preconnections. 
The abstract, general form in which these concepts are clothed 
allows of a double process of analysis and synthesis which is 
apparently logical, and this process, always futile yet ever 
self-satisfied, is carried on to infinity. Those who are best 
acquainted with the Chinese mentality—like De Groot, for 
instance—almost despair of seeing it free itself from its shackles 
and cease revolving on its own axis. Its habit of thought has 
become too rigid, and the need it has begotten is too imperious. 
It would be as difficult to put Europe out of conceit with her 
savants as to make China give up her physicians and doctors 
and Fung-shui professors. 

India has known forms of intellectual activity more akin 
to our own. She has had her grammarians, mathematicians, 
logicians and metaphysicians, Why, however, has she pro- 
duced nothing resembling our natural sciences ? Undoubtedly, 
among other reasons, because there, too, concepts as a rule 
have retained a very considerable proportion of the mystic 
elements of the collective representations whence they are 
derived, and at the same time they have become crystallized. 
Thus they have remained unable to take advantage of any 
later evolution which would gradually have freed them from 
such elements, as in similar circumstances Greek thought 
fortunately did. From that time, even in becoming conceptual, 
their ideas were no less destined to remain chiefly mystic, 
and only with difficulty pervious to the teaching of experi- 
ence. If they furnished matter for scientific knowledge, 
the sciences could only be either of a symbolical and imagina- 
tive kind, or else argumentative and purely abstract. In 
peoples of a less advanced type, even although already fairly 
civilized, such as in Egypt or Mexico, for instance, even the 
collective representations which have been “ precipitated ” 
as concepts have distinctly retained their prelogical, mystic 
features. 

Finally let us consider the most favourable case, that of 
peoples among whom logical thought still continues its 
progress, whose concepts remain plastic and capable of con- 
tinual modification under the influence of experience. Even in 
such circumstances logical thought will not entirely supersede 


382 HOW NATIVES THINK 


prelogical mentality. There are various reasons for the per- 
sistence of the latter. Firstly, in a large number of concepts 
there are indelible traces which still remain. It is far from 
being all the concepts in current use, for instance, which 
express the objective features and relations of entities and of 
phenomena solely. Such a characteristic is true of a very 
small number only, and these are made use of in scientific 
theorizing. Again, these concepts are, as a rule, highly 
abstract, and only express certain properties of phenomena 
and certain of their relations. Others, that is our most 
familiar concepts, nearly always retain some vestiges of the 
corresponding collective representations in prelogical mentality. 
Suppose, for example, that we are analysing the concepts of 
soul, life, death, society, order, fatherhood, beauty or anything 
else you like. If the analysis be complete it will undoubtedly 
comprise some relations dependent upon the law of partici- 
pation which have not yet entirely disappeared, 

Secondly, even supposing that the mystic, prelogical 
elements are finally eliminated from most concepts, the total 
disappearance of mystic, prelogical mentality does not neces- 
sarily follow. As a matter of fact the logical thinking which 
tends to realize itself through the purely conceptual and the 
intellectual treatment of pure concepts, is not co-extensive 
with the mentality which expressed itself in the earlier 
representations. The latter, as we know, does not consist of 
one function merely, or of a system of functions which are 
exclusively intellectual. It undoubtedly does comprise these 
functions but as still undifferentiated elements of a more 
complex whole in which cognition is blended with motor and 
above all emotional elements. If then, in the course of evo- 
lution the cognitive function tends to differentiate itself and 
be separated from the other elements implied in collective 
representations, it thereby achieves some kind of independ- 
ence, but it does not provide the equivalent of the functions 
it excludes. A certain portion of these elements, therefore, 
will subsist indefinitely outside and side by side with it. 

The characteristic features of logical thought are so clearly 
differentiated from those of prelogical mentality that the 
progress of the one seems, ipso facto, to involve the retro- 
gression of the other. We are tempted to conclude that in the 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 383 


long run, when logical thought imposes its laws on all mental 
operations, prelogical mentality will have entirely disappeared. 
This conclusion is both hasty and unwarranted, however. Un- 
doubtedly the stronger and more habitual the claims of reason, 
the less tolerant it is of the contradictions and absurdities 
which can be proved as such. In this sense it is quite true 
to say that the greater the advance made by logical thought, 
the more seriously does it wage war upon ideas which, formed 
under the dominance of the law of participation, contain 
implied contradictions or express preconceptions which are 
incompatible with experience. Sooner or later such ideas are 
threatened with extinction, that is, they must be dissolved. 
But this intolerance is not reciprocal. If logical thought does 
not permit contradiction, and endeavours to suppress it as 
soon as it perceives it, prelogical, mystic mentality is on the 
contrary indifferent to the claims of reason. It does not seek 
that which is contradictory, nor yet does it avoid it. Even 
the proximity of a system of concepts strictly in accordance 
with the laws of logic exerts little or no influence upon it. 
Consequently logical thought can never be heir to the whole 
inheritance of prelogical mentality.\ Collective representations 
which express a participation intensely felt and lived, of which 


it would always be impossible to demonstrate either the logical | 


contradiction or the physical impossibility, will ever be main- | 
tained. Ina great many cases, even, they will be maintained, 


sometimes for a long time, 7m spite of such a demonstration. 
The vivid inner sentiment of participation may be equal to, 
and even exceed, the power of the intellectual claim. Such, 
in all aggregates known to us, are the collective representa- 
tions upon which many institutions are founded, especially 
many of those which involve our beliefs and our moral and 
religious customs. 

The unlimited persistence of ccd collective representa- 
tions and of the type of mind of which they are the witness, 
among peoples in whom logical thought is most advanced, 
enables us to comprehend why the satisfaction which is de- 
rived from the most finished sciences (exclusive of those 
which are purely abstract) is always incomplete. Compared 
with ignorance—at least, conscious ignorance—knowledge 
undoubtedly means a possession of its object ; but compared 


aay 


384 HOW NATIVES THINK 


with the participation which prelogical mentality realizes, 
this possession is never anything but imperfect, incomplete, 
and, as it were, external. To know, in general, is to objectify ; 
and to objectify is to project beyond oneself, as something 
which is foreign to oneself, that which is to be known. How 
intimate, on the contrary, is the communion between entities 
participating of each other, which the collective representations 
of prelogical mentality assures! It is of the very essence of 
participation that all idea of duality is effaced, and that in 
spite of the law of contradiction the subject is at the same 
time himself and the being in whom he participates. To 
appreciate the extent to which this intimate possession differs 
from the objectifying apprehension in which cognition, pro- 
perly so called, consists, we do not even need to compare the 
collective representations of primitive peoples with the content 
of our positive sciences. It will be sufficient to consider 
one object of thought—God, for instance, sought after by 
the logical thought of advanced peoples, and at the same time 
assumed in the collective representations of another order. 
Any rational attempt to know God seems both to unite the 
thinking subject with God and at the same time to remove 
Him to a distance. The necessity of conforming with the 
claims of logic is opposed to a participation between man and 
God which is not to be represented without contradiction. 
Thus knowledge is reduced to a very small matter. But 
what need is there of this rational knowledge to the believer 
who feels himself at one with his God? Does not the con- 
sciousness which he possesses of his participation in the Divine 
essence procure him an assurance of faith, at the price of 
which logical certainty would always be something colourless 
and cold and almost a matter of indifference ? 

This experience of intimate and entire possession of the 
object, a more complete possession than any which originates 
in intellectual activity, may be the source and undoubtedly 
is the mainspring of the doctrines termed anti-intellectual. 
Such doctrines reappear periodically, and on each reappear- 
ance they find fresh favour. This is because they promise 
that which neither a purely positive science nor any theory of 
philosophy can hope to attain: a direct and intimate contact 
with the essence of being, by intuition, interpenetration, the 


TRANSITION TO THE HIGHER MENTAL TYPES 385 


mutual communion of subject and object, full participation 
and immanence, in short, that which Plotinus has described as 
ecstasy. They teach that knowledge subjected to logical 
formulas is powerless to overcome duality, that it is not a 
veritable possession, but remains merely superficial. Now the 
need of participation assuredly remains something more im- 
perious and more intense, even among peoples like ourselves, 
than the thirst for knowledge and the desire for conformity 
with the claims of reason. It lies deeper within us and its 
source is more remote. During the long prehistoric ages, 
when the claims of reason were scarcely realized or even per- 
ceived, it was no doubt all-powerful in all human aggregates. 
Even to-day the mental activity which, by virtue of an 
intimate participation, possesses its object, gives it life and 
lives through it, aspires to nothing more, and finds entire 
satisfaction in this possession. But actual knowledge in con- 
formity with the claims of reason is always unachieved. It 
always appeals to a knowledge that protracts it yet further, 
and yet it seems as if the soul aspires to something deeper than 
mere knowledge, which shall encompass and perfect it. 

Between the theories of the ‘“ intellectualists ’’ and their 
opponents the dialectic strife may be indefinitely prolonged, 
with alternating victories and defeats. The study of the 
mystic, prelogical mentality of undeveloped peoples may enable 
us to see an end to it, by proving that the problems which 
divide the two parties are problems which are badly couched. 
For lack of proceeding by a comparative method, philosophers, 
psychologists and logicians have all granted one common 
postulate. They have taken as the starting-point of their 
investigations the human mind always and everywhere homo- 
geneous, that is, a single type of thinker, and one whose mental 
operations obey psychological and intellectual laws which are 
everywhere identical. The differences between institutions 
and beliefs must be explained, therefore, by the more childish 
and ignorant use which is made of principles common to all 
aggregates. Accordingly a reflective self-analysis carried out 
by a single individual ought to suffice to discover the laws 
of mental activity, since all subjects are assumed to be con- 
stituted alike, as far as mind is concerned. 

Now such a postulate does not tally with the facts revealed 


25 


386 HOW NATIVES THINK 


by a comparative study of the mentality of the various human 
aggregates. This teaches us that the mentality of primitive 
peoples is essentially mystic and prelogical in character ; 
that it takes a different direction from our own—that is, 
that its collective representations are regulated by the law of 
participation and are consequently indifferent to the law of 
contradiction, and united, the one to the other, by connections 
and preconnections which prove disconcerting to our reason. 

It throws light, too, upon our own mental activity. It 
leads us to recognize that the rational unity of the thinking 
being, which is taken for granted by most philosophers, is a 
desideratum, not a fact. Even among peoples like ourselves, 
ideas and relations between ideas governed by the law of 
participation are far from having disappeared. They exist, 
more or less independently, more or less impaired, but yet 
ineradicable, side by side with those subject to the laws of 
reasoning. Understanding, properly so called, tends towards ~ 
logical unity and proclaims its necessity ; but as a matter of 
fact our mental activity is both rational and irrational. The 
prelogical and the mystic are co-existent with the logical. 

On the one hand, the claims of reason desire to impose 
themselves on all that is imagined and thought. On the other 
hand, the collective representations of the social group, even 
when clearly prelogical and mystic by nature, tend to subsist 
indefinitely, like the religious and political institutions of which 
they are the expression, and, in another sense, the bases. 
Hence arise mental conflicts, as acute, and sometimes as tragic, 
as the conflict between rival duties. They, too, proceed from 
a struggle between collective habits, some time-worn and 
others more recent, differently oriented, which dispute the 
ascendancy of the mind, as differing moral claims rend the 
conscience. Undoubtedly it is thus that we should account 
for the so-called struggle of reason with itself, and for that 
which is real in its antinomies. And if it be true that our 
mentality is both logical and prelogical, the history of religious 
dogmas and systems of philosophy may henceforth be explained 
in a new light. 


INDEX 


ABIPONES, 22, 31, 75, 100, I5I, 
157, 160, 178, 183, 259, 280-1, 
296, 309, 333, 334, 343-4 

abstraction, 116-21 

ADAIR, 297 

AFRICA, CENTRAL, 48, 130 

AFRICA, EAST, 50, 75, IOI, 257, 322, 
359 

AFRICA, EQUATORIAL, 65, 95, 
257, 277, 281, 293, 321 

AFRICA, SOUTH, 39, 157, 164, 
234, 287, 293, 310, 325, 349 

AFRICA, WEST, 54, 66-7, 128, 134, 
231, 238, 266, 267, 298, 305, 312, 
314, 326, 346 

alcheringa, 90, 92, 179, 317, 333, 338, 
345, 303 

Aleutian language, 146, 175 

AMERICA, CENTRAL, 88, 208, 213 

AMERICA, NORTH, 16, 31, 40, 47, 50, 
213, 222, 281 (v. NORTH AMERI- 
CAN INDIANS) 

AMERICA, NORTH, INDIANS OF, 56-7, 
70, 73, 85, 96, 97, 103, 112, 113, 
131, 133, 140, 160, 180, 196, 197, 
207, 208, 209, 211, 213-15, 232, 
244, 249, 292, 310, 352 

AMERICA, SOUTH, 102, 160, 181, 207, 
222, 284, 293, 355, 363 

ANDAMAN ISL., 22, 190, IQI 

animism, 18-27, 81-101, 102, 130, 365 

ARISTOTLE, 126 

ARNOT, 298 

arungquiltha, 133-4, 278 

ARUNTAS, 90, 92, 93, 119, 120, 133, 
261, 317, 323, 306 

ASHANTI, 64 

associationism, 26 

ASSYRO-BABYLONIANS, 218 

AUSTRALIA, CENTRAL (v. EYRE 
& SPENCER & GILLEN) 

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES, 22, 40, 40, 
G27700, (FIO, 012, (hisieteG.. 190; 
172, 181, 183, 207, 222, 262, 269- 


112, 


172, 


76, 282, 289, 293, 307, 311, 321, 
323, 338, 339-40, 341, 368 
Australian languages, 143, 144, 146, 
149, 158, 159, 160, 162, 174, 178, 
179, 192, 280, 311, 341, 343 
AYMONIER, 236-7 
AZTECS, 198 


badi, 40 

BAFIOTI, 40, 101 

BAGANDA, 243 (v. ROSCOE) 

BakiMma (v. ROSCOE) 

BAINING, 108 

BANCROFT, 88, 97, 157, 281 

Ba-RONGA, 102, 252-4, 270, 290, 
329-39, 334 

BA-YAKA (v. TORDAY & JOYCE) 

BENGAL, 65, 66, 252, 260, 309, 330 

BENNETT, 65, 233, 277, 322 

BERGAIGNE, 219-22 

BEST (ELSDON), 70, 172, 268-9 

BEVERIDGE, 269, 323 

birth, a reincarnation, 338-42 

birth, “‘ complete,”’ 342-3 

BISMARCK ARCHIPELAGO, 
170, 323 

BOAS (Fr.), 52, 86, 160, 175, 194, 
196, 199, 213, 232, 240, 242, 243, 
266, 274, 315, 320, 324 

BODDING, 51 

BonNTOC, 43, 312 

Bororo, 48, 77, 80, 91, 259, 260, 273, 
,309, 318, 327, 363, 307 

BOURLAY (A.), 265 

BOWDITCH, 64 

BRAZIL, 48, 77, III-I2, 115, 118, 
160, 164, 169, 171, 258, 273, 289, 
293, 302, 309, 318, 323, 327, 303 

BRIDGES, (T.), 150, 157 

BRITISH COLUMBIA, 52, 85, 94, 95, 
160, 163-4, 175, 196, 199, 212, 
231, 242, 274, 319 

BROOKE (Rajah), 95, 189, 231, 269, 
291 


144, 169, 


388 


BROUGH SMYTH, 159, 170, 174, 
268, 280, 283, 306, 323, 336, 341, 


349 
BROWN (W. H.), 231 
BRUHIER, 310 
BRUN, 281 
BUCKLAND, 209 
BULWER, 170 
burial customs, 21, 22, 308-16 
burial, premature, 309-10 


CALABAR, 88, 89 

CALIFORNIA, 171, 318, 324, 329, 344 

CANADA (v. BOAS) 

cardinal points, 211-12, 215-16 

CATLIN, 47, 80,\119, 180, 211, 215, 
227, 244, 252 

CEYLON, 321 

CHALMERS (J.), 186, 190 

CHAMBERLAIN, 51, 213, 218, 298 

CHARLEVOIX, 59, 96, 112-13, 133, 
157, 192 282,207. 274) 30% 

CHAUNCY, 341 

CHEROKEES, 38, 39, 50-I, 57, I4I, 
212 243. 290.) 23a2—%, 1237) 2320, 
266-7, 271, 273, 274, 275, 284, 297 

CHINA, CHINESE, 22, 23, 42, 46-7, 52, 
54, 128, 211712, 214,’ 216, 250, 
257, 287, 290, 299, 301, 304, 305, 
311, 314, 321, 322, 325, 332, 338, 
380-1 

churinga, 92, 93, 98, 117, 120, 134, 
323, 338, 363 

** classifiers,’ 199 

CODRINGTON (R. H.), 31, 134, 143, 
144, 193, 200-1 

collective representations, 13, 35-68, 
70) 1227610: 

COMTE (4.), 15, 16 

CONANT, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198, 
201 

concepts, 76-00, 116-21, 127, etc. 

CONGO, 70, 71, 281, 326, 340, 356, 357 

continuity of life, 103, 131 

couvade, 256-60, 342 

CRAWFURD, 198 

CROOKE (W.), 217, 296 

CULIN, 292 

CUMMINGS, 265 

CUNY, 145 

CUSHING (F. H.), 41, 52, 70, 101, 
I6I-2, I9I, 210, 291, 292, 366, 
373 


HOW NATIVES THINK 


DACOTA, 132 

DALE, 350 

DAYAKS, 188, 316 

death, primitive idea of, 276-82, 
301-22, 353 

DEGRANDPRE, 326 

DE GROOD (los MN 22 ea, ae, 
46-7, 48, 52, 54-5, 66-7, 211, 250, 
287, 290, 299, 301, 304, 305, 311, 
322, 325, 344, 381 

DÈNÈ-DINDJIÉ (v. PETITOT) 

DENNETT, 128, 209 

divination, 282-4 

DOBRIZHOFFER, 31, 75, 100, 145, 
146, 151, 157, 160, 178, 183, 184, 
259, 280-1, 296, 309, 323, 324, 356 

DORSEY, 52, 59-60, 85, 98, 132, 133, 
210, 214, 215, 216, 234, 305, 306, 
319 

dreams, significance of, 56-61 

DUARTE BARBOSA, 257 

DU CHAILLU, 64-5, 95, 239, 257, 
277, 321 

DURKHEIM (EMIL), 18 

DURKHEIM & MAUSS, 128, 364, 


365 


EDELFELT, 72, 318, 329 

EGYPT, 381 

EHRENREICH (P.), 102, 363 

ELLIS (A. B.), 48, 82-4, 305, 311, 
314, 322, 346 

BELIOT, 219 

ESKIMO, 231, 339 

EWE-LANGUAGE (v. ELLIS (A. B.) 
& SPIETH) 

experience, native impermeability to, 
63-5, 374 

EVRE, AG) LEP LIo 


fady, 178 

FANG, 65, 233, 277 

fetich, fetish, 65,67, 290 (v. NASSAU) 

fetish-man, 65, 356, 357 

FEWKES, 213, 216 

fighting, 244-5 

Fiji, FIJIANS, 54, 86, 179, 193, 201, 
348-9 

FISCHER (Dr. G. A.), 160 

fishing, 239-44 

FISON, 348 

FITZROY, 114 

FLETCHER (Miss A.), 103, 131 


INDEX 


FRASER (J.), 311 

FRAZER (Sir JAS.), 17, 18, 20, 21, 
22, 32, 56, 68, 102, 177, 278, 298, 
351, 353 

FROGGART, 349 

FUEGIANS, 22, I14 


GAGE, 88 

GALLATIN, 141, 168, 177 

GASON (S.), 160, 234 

GATSCHET (A.), 57, 62, 141, 142, 
147, 148, 149, 150-6, 168, 173, 
180, 199, 215, 260, 285 

gesture language, 159-64 

GLAVE,(E. J.), 357 

GORDON (E. M.), 346 

GOTTSCHLING (E.), 172 

GRA Y,-72 

GREECE, GREEKS, 314, 368, 381 

GREY (GEO.), 111, 172, 282 

GRIERSON, 169, 173, 197-8, 253 

GUARANIS, 183 

GUIANA, 41, 233, 271, 283, 335 

GUISE {(R. E.), 73, 241 


HADDON (A.), 84-5, 98, 160, 185, 
189, 190, 193 

HAGEN, 160, 258, 260, 283, 313 

HARTLAND (S.), 17 

HAWTREY, 192, 344 

HAYWOOD, 277 

HENNEPIN (Father), 49 

HENRY (4.), 287 

HENRY (V.), 146, 175 

HERTAUK,); 317, 319, 321 

HETHERWICK, 48, 130, 135 

HEWITT, 213, 306 

HEYWOOD, 212 

HIDATSA, 59, 85 

hikuli, 39, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128 

HILL TOUT, 52, 94-5, 164, 212, 231, 
244 

HOBLEY (C. W.), 75, 322 

HOFFMAN, 180 


Hopt, 252 

HOSE & MACDOUGALL, 58, 103, 
261 

HOWITT (A. W.), 56, 61, 185, 278, 
341, 364 

HUBERT & MAUSS, 99, 134, 135, 
237, 293, 307 


HUICHOLS, 38, 39, 63, 100, 122-5, 128, 
131, 237, 3006 


389 


HUME, 377 

HUNT, 185 

hunting, practices relating to, 228-39 
HURONS, 241, 242, 324, 326 


IGOROTS, 43, 312 

illness, how regarded, 263-76 

image, mystic idea of, 46-7, 79-80 

impermeability to experience, 63-8 

IM THURM, 233, 271 

INDIA, INDIAN TRIBES, 16, 40, 41, 47, 
50; | §6, 120, 128) 169, 173,170, 
180, 197-8, 217-19, 233, 240, 
241, 253, 260, 265-6, 296, 299-300, 
309, 310, 325, 332, 339, 344, 345, 
368 

INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO, 365 

INDO-CHINA, 236 

infanticide, 343-6 

initiation, 260-2, 347-54 

intichiuma, 39, 98, 247-51, 295, 362 

IROQUOIS, 213, 306 

iyuntarinia, 251, 355 


JAPAN, JAPANESE, 51, 198, 214, 218, 
298 

JASTROW, 218 

JAVA, 216 

JENSKS, 43,312 

JETTE (Fr.), 241 

JEWITT, 179, 180, 239, 240 

JONES (G. H.), 66 

FONOD LH LAN MIO TASIUTO 7 
252-4, 264, 270, 290, 293-4, 329- 
39, 335 


KAFIRS, 276, 281, 295 

karakia, 243, 347 

KEANE, 173 

KINGSLEY (MARY), 54-5, 66-7, 
70, 88, 89, 267, 271, 282, 290, 302, 
, 312, 340 

KiTcH1 GAMA, 59, 160 

KLAMATH, 57, 62, 141-56, 173, 180, 
215, 260, 285 

KOHL, 59, 160 

KOREA, 66 

KRUIJT (A. C.), 103, 365 

kwet, 66 


LANG (A.), 17, 20, 369 
language by gesture, 159-64 
Laos, 263-7, 265 


390 


LAPPS, 173 

LAST, 178 

Lautbilder, 164—6 

law of participation, chs. II, VI, 
VII, VIII 

LAWES (W.G.), 144 

LEIBNITZ, 61 

LEJEUNE, 85 

LEROY (Ch.), 182 

lisoka, 130-1 

LIVINGSTONE (D.), 64, 112, 157, 
165, 172-3, 174, 234, 287, 310 

LoanGo, 40, 43, 48, 65, 72, 73, 87, 
TOL, "113, 107,252; 257, 203~4, 
299, 322 

local relationship, 121, 129, 284 

LUMHOLTZ (C.), 38, 62-3, 122-5, 
239, 252, 297, 313, 329, 337 


MACDONALD, 325, 349 

MACDOUGALL (v. HOSE) 

MacGEE, 208, 209 

MACKINTOSH (4.), 265 

MACPHERSON, 345-7 

MADAGASCAR, 178 

MATER, H., 14 

maladies, 263-76 

MaALAYA, MALAYS, 39, 40, 57, IOI, 
178, 216, 234, 248, 252, 319, 339 

MALEBRANCHE, 99, 388 

MALLERY, 160 

mana, 14, 135, 176, 270, 347, 307 

MANDANS, 47, 80, 85, I19, 215, 227, 
252 

MANN, 205 

manual concepts, 161-2, I91I 

MAORIS, 70, 99, 172, 174, 201, 260, 
331, 367, 369 

MARETT, 365 

MARSHALL ARCHIPELAGO, 169 

masoka, 48 

MATHEWS, 144, 146, 149, 177, 178, 
235, 262, 341 

MAUSS, 208, 339 (vu. DURKHEIM 
& MAUSS, HUBERT & MAUSS 

medicine-men, 61-2, 65, 278 

medicine-men, initiation of, 354-8 

MEILLET (4.), 173-286 

memory, 109-16, 182-3 

MExIco, 38, 39, 62-3, 122, 123, 237, 
239, 252, 297, 313, 320, 337, 360, 
381 

MICRONESIA, 169 


HOW NATIVES THINK 


MIKHAILOVSKI, 62 

MOFFAT (R.), 172 | 

MOONEY (J. J.), 39, 50-1, 57, 212, 
213, 216, 232-3, 238, 243, 266-7, 
271, 275, 277; 297 

mort, 270 

MORICE, 194 

MOSKOWSKI, 311 


 mourning practices, 308-22 


MÜLLER (ÆGIDIUS), 276, 295 
mulungi, 130-1, 133, 270 

mystic abstraction, 117-21 

mystic perceptions, 38-63, 288 
myths, 368-74 


names, naming, 50-4, 346-7, 350, 357 

NASSAU (R. H.), 67, 231, 239, 266, 
270, 279, 298 

NEW FRANCE, 131 

New GUINEA, 72, 73, 142, 143, 144, 
160, 179, 186, 187, 188, 190, 207-8, 
252, 258, 283, 318, 329 

NEW HEBRIDES, 142, 144 

NEw MEXICO, 249 

NEW POMERANIA, 193-4 

New SOUTH WALES, 144, 145, 146, 
177, 234, 258 

NEW ZEALAND, 70, 172-73, 243, 268, 
296, 331, 336, 346-7, 307 

nganga, 356 

NICOBAR ISL., 42, 64, 239, 268 

NIUÉ (v. SAVAGE ISLAND) 

number-concepts, 192-4 

numbers, mystic power of, 205-23 

numeration, systems of, 181-92 

nurtunja, 116, I17, 119 


ondaqut, 47-8 
ovenda, 135, 176, 270 


Papua, PAPUANS, 142; 160, 169, 258, 
260, 283, 313 

Paraguay, 192 

PARKER (J.), 280-1 

PARKINSON (R.), 118, 169, 171, 
258, 323 

participation, law of, ch. II 

PASSARGE, 350, 353 

PECHUEL-LOESCHE, 40, 43, 48, 
65, 71-2, 73, 74, 87, 101 113, 114, 
167, 252, 257, 263-4, 299, 322 

PETITOT, 145, 204, 329 

PHILIPPINES, 43 

PHILLIPS, 7% 





INDEX 


plurals, 142-5 

PORTLAND, 191 

portraits, mystic idea of, 47-8 

POWELL (Major), 30, 58, 70, 141, 
150, 151, 168-9, 199 

POWERS, 171, 318, 324, 329, 344 

practices, primitives’, 227-358 

prefixes and suffixes, 152-8 

PREOGSS (Keath. 39 

primitives’ languages, 139-80 

primitives’ mentality prelogical, 78, 
295 

primitives not given to analysis, 
107-9 

primitives’ objections to change, 41-3 

primitives’ perceptions, 35-68, 288 


QUEENSLAND, 72, III 


PIS OH); 170 

READ (C. H.), 239 

REED (W. A.), 269 

RIBOT, 14, 15 

RISLEY, 65-6, 260, 330 

RIVERS (W. H. R.), 51 

ROBERTSON SMITH, 297 

ROHDE, 84 

ROMANS, 254, 314 

Mui Cs), 243, 276; 277, (295, 
302, 331, 340 

ROTH (W. E.), 62, 111, 158, 159, 162, 


| 341 
ROUGIER (E.), 264 


DACGARDN(FTr.),1 73,- 74, ZAI, 242, 
324, 326 

SAMOA, 31, 349 

SANTALS, 51 

SARASIN (P. and F.), 321 

SARAWAK, 57-8, 95, 103, 189, 231, 
261, 269, 291, 316 

SAVAGE ISLAND, 312, 349 

SCHMIDT (P. W.), 144, 351 

SCHOMBURGK (R.), 283, 335, 337 

SCHOOLCRAFT, 197, 237, 273 

SELIGMAN, 279 

shadows, 54-5 

shaman, initiation of, 354-8 

shamanism, 62 

shen, sien, 22, 66-7 

SIEROSHEWSKI, 87 

Stoux, SIOUANS, 52, 59-60, 85, 98, 
210, 243, 305-6, 319 


391 


SKEAT (W. W.), 40, 101, 102, 178, 
SLGWaigy 2348249 

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE, 16, 30 

SOCRATES, 126 

SOLOMON, 42, 64, 239, 268 

SOLOMON ISLES, 144, 193 

soul, bush, 88 

soul, double, 87 

soul, multiple, 84 

soul, primitive ideas of, 81-go 

space, conception of, 120-1 

SPENCER (HERBERT), 21, 26, 27 

SPENCER & GILLEN, 51, 58, 62, 
74, 84, 90, OI, 92, 93, 94, 99, 110, 
116, 117, 119-21, 133-4, 158, 159, 
170,102, 214,247, 245240, 251) 
258, 261, 262,1275,1278, 283, 284, 
317, 318, 319, 321, 323, 333-4, 
330, 339-49, 345, 350, 351, 354, 
355, 358, 362, 363, 367, 371 

SPIETH (J.), 324 

SPIX & MARTIUS, 160, 164, 171 

STEPHAN (Dr.), 194 

STEVENSON (Myrs:), 
316 

STOKES, 114, 340 

SUMATRA, 311 

sun, mystic idea of, 129, 371 

SWAN, 309 

“sympathetic magic,’’ 298 


210) ar elo: 


TAINE, 61 

TANNA, 72, 179 

tapu, taboo, 176, 268-9 

TARAHUMARES (v. MEXICO) 

TASMANIANS, 170 

TAYLOR (R.), 174, 296, 331, 336 

THOMPSON (B. A.), 86 

THOMSON (Basil), 312, 349 

THURSTON (E.), 260, 300, 316, 
325 

THWAITES (E.), 48 

TORDAY & JOYCE, 325, 348 

TORREND, 146, 164 

TORRES STRAITS, 84-5, 98, 134, 143, 
160, 171, 185-6, 187, 189, 193, 
201, 207, 239, 247-8, 279, 286, 
304, 342 

totem, 90-8, 120 

totemic pilgrimages, 121 

totemic relationship, 362 

transition to higher types, 361-36 

TUT Eleva 8) 251/240 


392 


PY LOR (EB) B.))46;.17, 20,247,305 
48, 56, 81, 83, 84, 89, 102, 134, 
298 

USENER, 207, 209 

VICTORIA (v. AUSTRALIAN ABORI- 
GINES) 

VON MARTIUS (C. F.), 258, 259, 
260, 284, 302, 336, 355 

VON DEN STEINEN, 48, 77, 91, 
III-I2, 114, 115, 118, 169, 259, 
273, 318, 323, 327 

VON DE WALL, 40 

VOTH, 252 


wakan, wakanda, 47, 103, 131, 132, 
133, 176, 270 
WEBSTER, 348, 351, 357 


HOW NATIVES THINK 


WESTERMANN, 165-6 
WESTERMARCK, 343 
WIDENMANN (A.), 160 * 
widows, treatment of, 331-5 
WILHELMI, 159, 236, 280, 341 
witchcraft, 289-300 

WOODS (J. D.), 160 

WYATT GILL (Dr.), 185 


YAHGANS, 149, 150 

Yaxkuts (v. SIEROSHEWSKI) 
Yaos, 48, 130, 133 

YARROW, 310 

YORUBA, 205 


ZAMBESI, 158, 174 

ZuRIs, AI, 70, 161-2, 192, 210, 214, 
249, 284, 291, 292, 295, 315, 334, 
367, 368-9, 373 


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